Doing so gets you 5GB of online storage and access to the Pages, Numbers, and Keynote browser apps. If you own an Apple device, the three apps are free to download and come preinstalled on desktop systems. Regardless of whether you own an Apple device, anyone can sign up for a free iCloud account. On the whole, other rival office suites, including our Editors' Choice winner Microsoft 365 Personal, offer better features and compatibility. If you find Apple’s apps sufficient for your needs, they’re a pleasure to use, and they offer unique features that you won’t find elsewhere-but which only relatively few users will need. Whether Apple wants you to think of them as a suite, all three share a unique graphic-centric approach. Pages, Numbers, and the Keynote presentation app are the three parts of an office suite that Apple’s website calls iWork but aren’t identified as such elsewhere. Both programs have features that you won’t find in any rival software, and their native file formats can't be read by any other apps.
How to Set Up Two-Factor AuthenticationĪpple paved its own path when creating the Pages word processor and Numbers spreadsheet apps.
It’s basically a juiced-up Microsoft PowerPoint with a sense of Apple aesthetics. It handles graphically-rich presentations with great transitions, embedded video in slides, high-quality charts, and even supports multiple people giving the same presentation. Apple first launched it in January 2003 on the Mac, and it’s remained an essential Mac app ever since. Keynote originated as an app developed for Steve Jobs to help him with his trademark live keynote presentations. Keynote: The Secret to Nice Presentations Apple And like the other iWork apps, Numbers includes very handy templates that cover a wide variety of situations, such as planning a family budget, calculating savings, creating invoices, and even keeping track of school attendance. It’s a spreadsheet app sporting a deep feature set (charts, sorting, formulas, inserting media) that can also work with Microsoft Excel workbooks. Numbers is the relative newcomer to the iWork suite, but not by much: Apple added Numbers to iWork in 2007 with the iWork ’08. It also includes nice templates for various types of documents like resumes, letters, books, and reports-and it edits Microsoft Word documents with ease.
It includes all the features you’d expect in a word processor since 1984 (fonts, bold, italics, justification) plus support for tables, charts, and inserting rich media into documents. Perhaps the crown jewel of the iWork suite, Pages is a solid word processor that also doubles as a page layout app similar to Adobe InDesign.
RELATED: How to Create an Apple ID on Your iPhone or iPad Pages: A Versatile Word Processor Apple Let’s take a brief look at each app individually below. You can also edit the same documents on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and in the cloud. AppleĮach of these iWork apps can handle importing or exporting files from their Microsoft equivalent apps, which makes collaborating with Windows owners a little easier. Apple also offers iWork for iCloud, which is a suite of cloud-based versions of these apps accessible through a web browser on any platform (including Windows) if you have an Apple ID.