Apple to update iWork with better Pencil integration, improved collaboration

Along with its iPad reveal today, Apple announced a slew of updates for its iWork suite across iOS and macOS devices.

First up, Keynote now lets users animate objects with the Apple Pencil or their finger on iOS. Users can draw a path to animate an object across a slide in Keynote.

Additionally, the update brings the full power of Keynote’s ‘action builds’ feature to iOS with a new user interface. Action builds lets you add sophisticated animations to objects, including rotations, movements, changes to scale, opacity and more.

There’s also a new option to make animated GIFs using Keynote slides. This works on iOS and macOS.

Finally, Keynote for iOS now lets you edit presenter notes while you’re presenting or rehearsing.

Pages brings two new macOS features to iOS as well. First up, iOS users can now access the Table of Contents view to explore Pages documents easily. Users can also insert a table of contents into a Pages document on iOS.

On top of that, Pages for iOS now lets users switch between word processing and page layout views.

The new Numbers update improves how the program handles CSV and TSV imports on both iOS and macOS. iOS users also get an increase to the max zoom in Numbers, allowing them to zoom to 400 percent.

Further, Numbers on iOS lets users make precise changes to row and column sizes.

Finally, Apple is adding several improvements across the iWork suite. For one, users can now edit grouped objects while collaborating. Plus, the maximum file size is now 2GB.

Users can also save and sync custom shapes, templates and themes across macOS and iOS using iCloud. Finally, iOS users can easily create image placeholders without messing with the formatting of a page, slide or spreadsheet.

There’s also support for vertical text in Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages.

Apple says the updates will be available starting next week.