Besides contacts and calendars, your documents are some of the most important files in your digital life. With the iWork suite, and a trip to iCloud.com on your Mac or PC, you can keep them in sync across all your computers and iOS devices. Just log in, click the iWork icon, and then choose an iWork application at the top of the screen. Drag files associated with the application (including iWork ’09, Office, or .txt and .csv documents) into your browser to upload them to iCloud. You can also click the gear icon to upload files through a conventional Finder interface, and even search for documents. Once files are in the cloud, you can browse them by application, select and Control-click documents to duplicate or delete them, or download files on other computers in the their original formats (and alternates like .pdf). Documents stored on iCloud.com count against your storage limit, just like your other synced data.
Change a file here and it’s changed everywhere.
Files on iCloud.com are immediately available in the file browsers of your iOS iWork apps (or as immediately as your internet connection allows). If you’re opening a file created in a desktop version of your application, you may get a warning that the document contains features incompatible with the iOS app, but it should still open normally. Then you can edit it just as you would any document, and edits made on your iOS devices are automatically pushed back to the cloud. Of course, new documents created in an iOS iWork app aren’t left out of the fun, either. They’re available to all your other iCloud devices as soon as they’re created.
You can download iWork files in their native formats, or an alternate.
But just as Apple’s cloud-based services have simplified the evolution from MobileMe to iCloud, so have its document-syncing tools. Cupertino’s earlier effort at online productivity, iWork.com, was built with collaboration in mind. It featured the ability to view a document’s contents, leave annotations, and invite people to share files with you in a browser. Documents in the Cloud lacks these features in favor of an iOS-centric approach to sharing, and any documents you’ve exported to iWork.com won’t show up in iCloud. You’ll have to download them first, then re-upload them manually. We’re not sure what Apple’s plans for iWork.com might be, but one thing’s for sure: syncing documents has gotten a whole lot simpler, and that’s fine by us.
mjgolden
February 09, 2012 at 11:15am
Great update, but am I missing something?
I use Pages and Numbers on my iPhone and iPad and updates/changes work great. Invaluable for entering new data on the fly. For example, the spreadsheet where I track miscellaneous expenses day-to-day as they occur, and once a month submit them for reimbursement.
The disconnect is with the desktop versions of Pages and Numbers on my iMac.
Sure, I can manually go to my iCloud storage through Safari, open my "doc-in progress," but to keep it in sync I have to close the document on my desktop then manually drag the updated version back to iCloud.
Isn't there someway to open cloud documents directly from Pages on my desktop and have that doc, with its changes, automatically go back to iCloud?
I just want to do from my desktop what happens on my iOS devices. Whenever and wherever I open "February Expenses" (on my Mac, on my iPhone, on my iPad), know that I am opening the latest version, and when I am finished and close the doc, the changes will be reflected the next time I open the file, whether that be on my Mac, my phone, well ... you get the picture. Manually fetching and saving docs when at my desktop to the cloud is an invitation for version conflict.
Just give me the option when working from iWorks apps on my desktop to "open from iCloud" and have changes go back to iCloud when I am done. Is that to much to ask, or is it there and I just can't find it?
