Last fall Apple began making their popular iWork suite available for free on new iOS devices and Macs. Also, it's available for free to anyone in iCloud. If you have an older device, the iWork suite costs $10 per app. It includes Pages for word processing and page layout, Numbers for spreadsheet work, and Keynote for presentations. When I got my new iPad Air, I downloaded pages and was impressed with how intuitive the interface is while having good functionality. Last week Apple released a major update to the suite on all platforms: iOS, iCloud, and Mac. You can find extensive detail on the new features and improvements on Apple's website. One focus of improvement was compatibility with Microsoft Office documents. Pages and Numbers are now more compatible with Office 2013 files. In addition, various facets of importing and exporting Office documents have been improved.
New features related to sharing documents include a view-only option so that others can read but not edit documents that you share. It's also now possible to share password-protected files. If you use Numbers on your iPhone, an important new feature is the ability to edit documents in landscape orientation. The three iWork apps also now let you search for documents by name. The update for Keynote offers a variety of new build animations and transitions. Pages now includes a vertical ruler, customizable alignment guides, and the ability to preserve inline images and shapes in table cells in imported documents.
Any document that you create in iWork on your device is automatically stored in iCloud, and any changes to documents are automatically synced among your devices. So if you haven't used your free web-based iCloud account, you may want to take a look at its features. The update also brought major new collaboration tools to iWork in iCloud, making it easier for groups to jointly edit documents. These tools include the ability to view the list of collaborators currently in a document; to see cursors and selections for everyone in a document; to jump to a collaborator’s cursor by clicking the name in the collaborator list; and to watch images and shapes animate as your collaborators move them around.
Apple is definitely focused on creating a great office suite with seamless cloud features and integration with other popular software. And it's free!