Open Microsoft Office files.

If someone sends you a Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file, you can open it in iWork. And it's easy to make Microsoft Office documents look great, thanks to the powerful graphics and formatting tools in iWork. Numbers also opens vCards, Open Financial Exchange files, and comma-separated-value and tab-delimited files. Pages also opens Rich Text Format (RTF) documents.

Save as Microsoft Office files.

Share your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with anyone on a Mac or PC. You can save everything you do in Pages, Numbers, or Keynote as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF files. Keynote also lets you save your presentation as a QuickTime movie or a PDF, HTML, or image file. You can even send a Keynote presentation directly to YouTube.

Email files in many formats.

Share work quickly in iWork using the Share menu in each application. Just click Share to email your documents in iWork, Microsoft Office, or PDF formats using Mac OS X Mail.

Pages

Even before you start writing, your document looks great. With over 180 Apple-designed templates, a professionally polished resume, brochure, school report, or invitation is waiting for you to make it your own. Use the Template Chooser to find the one you like. Add your own words inside the text placeholders. Use the Media Browser to drop photos from your iPhoto library directly into graphics placeholders. And there you have it: a beautifully designed, professional-quality document made in minutes.

Tables and charts make data instantly more compelling. You can copy and paste charts from Numbers into your document. The data is linked, so when you change the data in your spreadsheet, you can update your chart in Pages with just a click.

Resumes, school reports, flyers, and invitations — over 180 Apple-designed templates are ready to go.

Creating great-looking documents is simple with Pages. At the top of the page, the contextual Format Bar lets you do the basics — formatting text and adjusting images — with just one click. View and choose fonts with the “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) font menu. Change text size and color. Adjust line spacing and paragraph alignment. Apply character and paragraph styles. When you select a photo, shape, or table on the page, the Format Bar displays tools to adjust the images. And while you write, Pages can automatically format lists with bullets or numbers, check your spelling, proofread your document, and generate a table of contents.

Fine-tuning your document is easy, too. You can add headers, footers, footnotes, and bookmarks with a few clicks. Insert section, layout, and page breaks from a pull-down menu. And the word count is visible at the bottom of the page — just click the total to see details including the number of characters, lines, paragraphs, and more. When it comes to word processing, streamlined and smart come standard in Pages.

There's more to the story. Any word processor can help you type. Pages gives you all the tools you need to write and perfect your writing. Now you can view your document full screen. With one click, clutter disappears so you focus on what you’re writing and make changes without distractions. Organize your ideas in Outline mode. Create an outline with multiple levels, expand or collapse topics, and drag and drop to promote or demote items. Mail merge takes your data from Numbers or your contacts from Address Book to create personalized letters, invoices, and faxes. And in Pages, you can insert sophisticated equations into your lab reports with MathType 6 and add professional bibliographies to your research papers using EndNote X2.1

When it’s time for comments and feedback, change tracking makes collaboration with anyone easier, clearer, and more concise. And it’s always easy to find your place. Next to your document, you see thumbnails of all your pages and sections, including changes that have been made. Quickly copy or delete a section. Or drag and drop to move sections around. Scroll through thumbnails to preview your document or enlarge them for a better view.

Create your own design from a blank canvas — Pages makes page layout easy. Choose fonts and add images, graphics, tables, and 3D charts. Powerful graphics tools let you resize and rotate photos, apply reflections and shadows, add picture frames, and remove backgrounds from images with a simple point and click. You can even control the text: how it looks, how it flows, and how it wraps around images. Move everything around on the free-form canvas until you see the layout you envisioned.

It’s an easy read. In any format. Pages makes it easy to share your documents with colleagues or friends. You can open Microsoft Word files in Pages and save your Pages documents as Word files. With powerful graphics and formatting tools, it's easy to make Word documents look great in Pages. You can also save your Pages documents as RTF files or plain text or export them as PDF files. With the new email option, send Pages, Word, or PDF documents right from Pages using Mac OS X Mail.

Read more...