Apple Updates iWork, but There’s No Sign of iPadOS 13 Features Yet

Although just about any member of the public can now get their hands on the iOS and iPadOS 13 betas, we shouldn’t really expect to see third-party — or even first-party — apps updated to take advantage of the new operating systems until they’re actually released in final form this fall.

Nowhere it this more evident than in Apple’s own iWork suite of apps — Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. The company just released a pretty interesting new update, but if anybody was hoping that the new versions would play nicer with the new App Expose and multi window features in iPadOS 13, it seems you’re still going to have to wait a while longer.

So What Is New?

The biggest changes that the new iWork suite of apps will offer iPad users are enhanced Apple Pencil customization and the use of intelligent face detection for positioning photos in placeholders. There are also a bunch of new style options for text, offering the ability to fill text with gradients or images and apply new outline styles, and nice improvements that offer more advanced editing for charts and tables.

Pages also gains more customizable lists, with new bullet types and the ability to change the size and color of bullets. There are also several new features for organizing content within a document, such as linking to different sections, and copying and pasting whole pages and sections between documents. You can also now add new words and spellings to the built-in dictionary, and even take advantage of new templates for publishing novels.

Numbers gets a new 128-bit calculation engine that Apple promises will improve accuracy, along with all of the new organizing, editing, and style enhancements. You can also now add rows to filtered tables and adjust the appearance of cell borders.

Keynote users will now have the ability to edit master slides when collaborating with other users, and the same gamut of new style options as the rest of the suite.

All three apps now allow you to choose whether the Apple Pencil will automatically start drawing, or instead be used for selection and scrolling. Users of the second-generation Apple Pencil can also switch between either mode by double-tapping on the pencil, an enhancement that we’re sort of surprised wasn’t there when the iPad Pro and second-gen Pencil originally debuted last year.

Lastly, the face detection feature is an especially interesting addition, since it will make it easier to just drop photos into Keynote presentations and newsletter- and brochure-style Pages documents — one area in which Pages has always stood out compared to Microsoft Word and Google Docs.

While Pages, Numbers, and Keynote may not be everyone’s go-to apps, especially since support and compatibility with them in virtually non-existent outside of the Apple ecosystem, they’re almost always the first apps to embrace the new capabilities offered by Apple’s own hardware and OS updates. While full iPadOS 13 compatibility may not be here yet, we have no doubt that another series of iWork updates will be coming in the days following the general release of Apple’s new operating systems, which are expected to be coming in September.