What is "iwork"

Apple Productivity Apps, formerly and commonly known as iWork, is an office suite of applications created by Apple Inc. for its OS X and iOS operating systems, and also available cross-platform through the iCloud website.

It includes Keynote, a presentation program; the word processing and desktop publishing application Pages; and the spreadsheet application Numbers. It is generally viewed as a prosumer office suite targeted at home and small business users, with fewer features than competitors such as Microsoft's Office for Mac and the open source LibreOffice project (and indeed its own earlier versions), but has a simpler user interface, strong touchscreen support and built-in links with Apple's iCloud document-hosting service and its Aperture and iPhoto image management applications. Apple's design goals in creating iWork have been to allow Mac users to easily create attractive documents and spreadsheets, making use of OS X's extensive font library, integrated spelling checker, sophisticated graphics APIs and its AppleScript automation framework.

The equivalent Microsoft Office applications to Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, respectively. Although Microsoft Office applications cannot open iWork documents, iWork applications can export documents from their native formats (.pages, .numbers, .key) to Microsoft Office formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.) as well as to PDF files.

The oldest application in iWork is Keynote, first released as a standalone application in 2003. Pages was released with the first iWork release in 2005; Numbers was added in 2007 with the release of iWork '08. The next release, iWork '09, also included access to iWork.com, a beta service that allowed users to upload and share documents, now integrated into Apple's iCloud service. An iOS port was released in 2010 with the first iPad and has been regularly updated since. In 2013, Apple released a new OS X version and iWork for iCloud, a set of cross-platform web applications replicating the native software versions.

iWork was initially sold as a suite for $79, then later at $19.99 per app on OS X and $9.99 per app on iOS. Apple announced on October 22, 2013 that iOS devices purchased from September 2013 onward and OS X computers purchased from October 2013 onward, whether new or refurbished, are eligible for a free download of all three iWork apps. iWork for iCloud, which also incorporates a document hosting service, is free to all holders of an iCloud account.