Apple Updates iWork Suite For Mobile/desktop Compatibility

If you're all about keeping your applications up to date, especially if you've got a giant presentation at a board meeting at the end of the week and use Apple's suite of iWork tools, you'll want to pay attention to this wave of upgrades. It's time first of all for iWork to be updated to version 9.3, this allowing iWork for Mac to support iWork for iOS 1.7 apps. In addition to this, you've got Keynote, Numbers, and Pages to update this afternoon as well.

If you've made your purchase of any of the following apps via a software box, you'll be getting this update via your Software Update feature inside of OS X – up in the left-hand corner there under the Apple. If you've purchase them through the App Store for Mac, that's where you'll be going to grab these updates. The result is the same either way, but the means are certainly different in getting this all to go through and forward.

With Pages 1.7 you'll be getting a collection of new features including the ability to add reflections to shapes and to lock and unlock objects – simple stuff, game-changing for some. You'll be able to use Change Tracking to see which bits of body text have been modified in your project, you can accept and reject individual changes just as you would review a document, and you can preserve calculation in tables when you're importing them from and exporting them to Pages for Mac – hot stuff. You can now preserve tracked changes in documents exported in Microsoft Word or Pages formats, and perhaps most importantly: you can now import Pages and Microsoft Word documents with change tracking (important if you're going to preserve it) and continue to track these changes to body text.

In Numbers 1.7 you'll have new compatibility with Numbers for Mac and Microsoft Excel, this beginning with the ability import and export Number for Mac spreadsheets with filters and to turn filters off and on. This update brings in the ability to preserve rich text in tablets when importing and exporting, add reflections to shapes, and lock and unlock objects. You can also now hide and unhide rows and columns.

Keynote 1.7 allows you to work in a newly compatible way with Microsoft PowerPoint and Keynote for Mac with the ability to import and export all Microsoft PowerPoint and Keynote for Mac slide sizes as well as presentation themes, master slides and present styles included. You can now play back all Keynote action builds, add new slide transitions including Shimmer and Sparkle, and preserve calculations in tablet when you're importing from and exporting to Keynote for Mac. This update adds reflections to shapes, of course, and the ability to lock and unlock objects. Finally it allows new print layout options like printing with presenter notes, with builds, and without backgrounds.

Grab it all from your respective Appstore, be it mobile or desktop, right this minute! Have a peek at our gigantic Apple portal as well for the big jump into the Apple-only news universe.