14 DAY TRIAL // Apple is making good on its promise to bring back some features to its iWork productivity suite by introducing new collaboration tools, folders and printing.
Leaving customers dismayed after updating the entire iWork suite with 64-bit support and a unified file format, Apple is backtracking on its decision to pull out some features for the sake of consistency.
In a new update for Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for iCloud beta, Apple is introducing “new features that make creating beautiful documents with others easier than ever before. It also adds top customer requests, including folders and printing,” according to the Mac maker.
All three apps get a Collaborator list, where users can view the list of collaborators currently working on a document. Cursors and selections can be seen as well, and you can now jump to a collaborator’s cursor by clicking their name in the collaborator list.
As your collaborators move images and shapes around, you can watch their progress in real time. Printing is now available directly from the Tools menu, and you can now organize your documents into folders, just like before.
A couple of specific updates are made for Numbers (outlined below). You can change the order of the sheets in the browser, and you can generate links with the HYPERLINK feature.
Also new, Keynote now lets you skip slides by right-clicking in the navigator during playback.
In its November 11 Support document on bringing back features to the iWork suite, Apple said, “We plan to reintroduce some of these features in the next few releases and will continue to add brand new features on an ongoing basis.”
This is just a small part of the promised changes which, according to Apple, will take around half a year to be fully deployed.