Apple Promises iWork Features To Return Over The Next Six Months

Apple has released a statement responding to some of the negative press surrounding iWork 2013. The latest iteration of the software is free for all new Mac users, but unfortunately, the software lost some functionality from its 2009 release. Some of these features include the vertical ruler in pages, multi-column and range sort in Numbers, and the ability to restore old transitions and builds in Keynote.

The company has not only addressed these concerns, but Apple has promised to re-add a number of these features to the productivity suite over the next year.

Apple’s statement:

The new iWork applications-Pages, Numbers, and Keynote-were released for Mac on October 22nd. These applications were rewritten from the ground up to be fully 64-bit and to support a unified file format between OS X and iOS 7 versions, as well as iWork for iCloud beta.

These apps feature an all-new design with an intelligent format panel and many new features such as easy ways to share documents, Apple-designed styles for objects, interactive charts, new templates, and new animations in Keynote.
In rewriting these applications, some features from iWork ’09 were not available for the initial release. 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.

In the release, Apple also released a list of features that will be added to iWork over the next half-year:

Pages:

  • Customize toolbar
  • Vertical ruler
  • Improved alignment guides
  • Improved object placement
  • Import of cells with images
  • Improved word counts
  • Keyboard shortcuts for styles
  • Manage pages and sections from the thumbnail view

Numbers:

  • Customize toolbar
  • Improvements to zoom and window placement
  • Multi-column and range sort
  • Auto-complete text in cells
  • Page headers and footers
  • Improvements to AppleScript support

Keynote:

  • Customize toolbar
  • Restoring old transitions and builds
  • Improvements to presenter display
  • Improvements to AppleScript support

Though this might be a pretty long wait for quite a few important features, it’s nice to see that Apple is aware of their absence and is working on adding these features back soon.

Via: TUAW

Andrew is a geek, Apple enthusiast, blogger and coffee lover from Chicago.