Apple’s Pages, Keynote and Numbers productivity apps gain a few new features

Apple’s iWork productivity  suite—Pages, Keynote and Numbers—has received a few new features and smaller improvements across the iPhone, iPad and Mac.

Apple's marketing image showing Numbers version 11.2 with the Radar charts on Mac
  • In Pages, up to 2GB files are permitted when publishing to Apple Books
  • In the Numbers app, you can capture snapshots of table cells without formulas
  • In Keynote, it’s now possible to zoom in on a presentation slide up to 400 percent

Apple’s iWork apps pick up new features after six months

Representing the first feature-focused refresh to the iWork suite of apps, Apple has now bumped Pages, its word processor, as well as the spreadsheet app Numbers and Keynote, the presentation software that Apple uses for all its keynotes, to version 12.0. Aside from fixes and quality-of-life updates, the updated apps bring a few new features across the iPhone, iPad and Mac.

  • Pages: New VoiceOver controls for tracking changes and reading comments.
  • Numbers: You can adjust font size up to two decimal places and use new VoiceOver controls for creating formulas. When capturing snapshots of table cells, formulas, categories or hidden, values will no longer be shown.
  • Keynote: Zoom in on slides 400 percent. Adjust font sizs in smaller increments.

Those improvements are for the Mac versions of the apps. As for the iOS and iPadOS side of things, Pages now supports a new long-tap action on the Home screen icon that lets you create a new document. You can also create a new document from within the app, but the home screen shortcut is now the fastest way to do it.

The updates are now live on the App Store.

Although Apple offers Pages, Numbers and Keynote as separate downloads, the company calls these Office replacement apps the iWork suite. As mentioned, this is the first time in more than six months that these apps saw meaningful updates. The previous major update, dated September 2021, brought a bunch of new productivity and collaboration features.