iWork Comes to Apple’s iPad

January 28, 2010 By Dena Cassella

Apple has put its iWork productivity software on its new iPad tablet computer.

Although we weren’t thoroughly impressed with most of Apple’s iPad apps, mostly because they were just enlarged versions of iPhone apps, we did appreciate this mobile version of business productivity tools, iWork. Apple announced yesterday that it has designed a new version of iWork, its Mac productivity platform, for the iPad tablet PC. Apple says its iWork software suite, which includes Keynote (for presentations), Numbers (spreadsheets), and Pages (word processing), will create “incredible” presentations, word processing documents, and spreadsheets by directly touching the words and images on the iPad’s Multi-Touch screen.

“With Pages, Keynote and Numbers you can create beautifully formatted documents, stunning presentations with animations and transitions, and spreadsheets with charts, functions and formulas,” says Apple. “While they’re simple and easy to use, they’re also the most powerful productivity apps ever built for a mobile device.”

These apps have been completely redesigned for the iPad, so they aren’t the full desktop functionality, but they essentially commit the same power and features the original iWork has. The iWork for iPad apps are $9.99 each—a cheap buy compared to the Mac OS version of the suite, which sells for $99 for all three—and will be available at the iTunes App Store. It’s also quite nice that the three productivity programs are sold separately, so those folks who try to avoid spreadsheets can continue avoiding them.

Showing 5 comments

Apple launches iWork for iPhone, iPod touch (Digital Trends) at 11:18am 31st May 2011 [...] productivity software, which comes in a Mac OS X version, has been available for the iPad since January of 2010. The complete iWork software suite includes a variety of apps: Keynote, for creating slide [...]
JohnA at 7:46am 17th April 2010 FYI, that will change later this year when Apple releases iPhone OS 4. Among many other nice features, iPhone OS 4 will introduce multitasking to the iPhone, iPod, and iPad.
dang at 9:12pm 28th January 2010 Yup, you can paste between applications, but it does somewhat suck that you have to close/open/close/re-open to do so multiple times.

The good news about this is that Safari remembers pages, so you don't have to re-type in the URL.

I still think copy/paste on the iPhone is clunky, especially compared to a Blackberry. Hopefully it's better on the iPad.
Ian Bell at 8:34pm 28th January 2010 Good point. My guess is that saving something to your clipboard is not considered multi-tasking. The iPhone works that way. It just means you cannot run simultaneous applications, not that the CPU can't do multiple things at once.
emellaich at 8:03pm 28th January 2010 One thing I don't get here is how this jives with the lack of multi-tasking. You build a presentation. You want to include graphics from the internet and a spreadsheet element. You need to do research on the internet to design the presentation. How do you integrate these apps without multi-tasking?

Is it close/open/copy/close/open/paste? or is there more to this story that we don't know yet?