Numbers, Pages, and Keynote gain Apple Intelligence smarts

AppleInsider

Apple has updated its iWork suite of apps, with Numbers, Keynote, and Pages gaining the ability to use Apple Intelligence features.

Image Playground in Numbers for iPadOS

Apple's update to iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2 made some considerable changes to Apple Intelligence. Now, Apple's iWork suite can take advantage of them.

Updates to Numbers, Keynote, and Pages released on Thursday now add support to the new features of Apple Intelligence, which should help users work smarter.

Pages version 14.3, Keynote version 14.3, and Numbers version 14.3 all have broadly the same version notes, with minor tweaks to relate them to each app.

The first listing is to "Proofread, summarize, and compose text for your document with Writing Tools." This is handy for users, as it enables Apple Intelligence to proofread text to flag mistakes or issues.

Writing Tools in Pages on iOS

In cases such as using Pages for long stretches of text, users could also ask Writing Tools to reword the entire piece to change how it sounds. For example, a more casual or formal text, which could be "witty", "engaging," and "Empathetic."

The second bullet point states the update can "Create fun, original images for your document with Image Playground." This is a tool that can generate images based on prompts, as well as source images stored in Photos.

Image Playground in Pages on iPadOS

This is handy if you need to break up a large document full of numbers or text, to make it more visually appealing. This is especially useful if you don't have source imagery, or don't want to trawl stock image sites for content.

The last bulletpoint reads "Siri can use ChatGPT to answer questions about content" in the document. Asking Siri a question in a document can bring up the option to send the request and the document to ChatGPT for a response.

ChatGPT via Siri in Pages for iPadOS

This is more useful for Numbers and Pages, as documents can include a lot of text or data points that may take the typical user a long time to parse. Having ChatGPT answer a question about an extremely lengthy contract could save users a lot of time.

The updates to Numbers, Keynote, and Pages are now available in the App Store and the Mac App Store as free downloads.



Read on AppleInsider

StrangeDays

Not a witty or emphatic person? No problem, just push a button and you can pretend you are!

bikertwin

Are you a medical insurance industry executive? Use Pages in "Empathetic" mode to make your medical care denial sound more empathetic to the person whose health you're destroying! They'll love you for it.

"Create fun, original images for your document with Image Playground."

"Create fun creepy, original disturbing images for your document with Image Playground."

sunman42

bikertwin said:

Are you a medical insurance industry executive? Use Pages in "Empathetic" mode to make your medical care denial sound more empathetic to the person whose health you're destroying! They'll love you for it.

"Create fun, original images for your document with Image Playground."

"Create fun creepy, original disturbing images for your document with Image Playground."

——

That’s OK. Over two million people visit the Prado in Madrid every year, just to see the creepy, disturbing images painted by El Greco.

Pema

That's brilliant. Now we need to round up roster of users from Antartica and Upper Mongolia who actually use the Apple equivalent of Office. In my entire time in IT and as a Uni Phd student I have yet to see anyone using other than Word, Excel, Powerpoint. 

sidrictheviking

Pema said:

That's brilliant. Now we need to round up roster of users from Antartica and Upper Mongolia who actually use the Apple equivalent of Office. In my entire time in IT and as a Uni Phd student I have yet to see anyone using other than Word, Excel, Powerpoint. 

Greetings from Mongolian Antarctica!
As a regular (and long-time) user of both Pages and Keynote I’m surprised to read your post. I’ve used Word and PowerPoint over the decades but moved to Pages and Keynote exclusively many years ago. Bring free certainly helped. However, the main reason is ease of use. I work almost exclusively from an iPad and find Keynote, in particular, to be intuitive and very user friendly. When I need to work with Office documents I simply import them into the Apple equivalent and work with them there. When necessary, I export them back to their Office versions and it’s a painless exercise. 

Sadly, as I live in the EU (Ireland), I won’t have access to these new feature until April. I am very much looking forward to using Image Playground for Keynote, as I regularly spend far too long finding appropriate images for my presentations. From what I’ve seen so far, I should be able to create suitable ones in seconds for each slide. I don’t need photorealistic, just clear and relevant. 

😎🇮🇪☘️ 

Pema

sidrictheviking said:

Pema said:

That's brilliant. Now we need to round up roster of users from Antartica and Upper Mongolia who actually use the Apple equivalent of Office. In my entire time in IT and as a Uni Phd student I have yet to see anyone using other than Word, Excel, Powerpoint. 

Greetings from Mongolian Antarctica!
As a regular (and long-time) user of both Pages and Keynote I’m surprised to read your post. I’ve used Word and PowerPoint over the decades but moved to Pages and Keynote exclusively many years ago. Bring free certainly helped. However, the main reason is ease of use. I work almost exclusively from an iPad and find Keynote, in particular, to be intuitive and very user friendly. When I need to work with Office documents I simply import them into the Apple equivalent and work with them there. When necessary, I export them back to their Office versions and it’s a painless exercise. 

Sadly, as I live in the EU (Ireland), I won’t have access to these new feature until April. I am very much looking forward to using Image Playground for Keynote, as I regularly spend far too long finding appropriate images for my presentations. From what I’ve seen so far, I should be able to create suitable ones in seconds for each slide. I don’t need photorealistic, just clear and relevant. 

😎🇮🇪☘️ 

The Irishman who came in from the Cold. 

Kidding aside as an academic I rely on Word exclusively namely for its vast library of add-ons and ties to various components. Couldn't do without them. So far as Excel is concerned I use the functionality of VBA - underpinning of Excel - at least two to three times a week. 

Powerpoint I am less concerned about. 

I fully realise that Pages, Numbers and Keynote are free. But they just lack the real world functionality. 

That said, I would never use any other hardware than a Mac. 

Penzi

Pema said:

sidrictheviking said:

Pema said:

That's brilliant. Now we need to round up roster of users from Antartica and Upper Mongolia who actually use the Apple equivalent of Office. In my entire time in IT and as a Uni Phd student I have yet to see anyone using other than Word, Excel, Powerpoint. 

Greetings from Mongolian Antarctica!
As a regular (and long-time) user of both Pages and Keynote I’m surprised to read your post. I’ve used Word and PowerPoint over the decades but moved to Pages and Keynote exclusively many years ago. Bring free certainly helped. However, the main reason is ease of use. I work almost exclusively from an iPad and find Keynote, in particular, to be intuitive and very user friendly. When I need to work with Office documents I simply import them into the Apple equivalent and work with them there. When necessary, I export them back to their Office versions and it’s a painless exercise. 

Sadly, as I live in the EU (Ireland), I won’t have access to these new feature until April. I am very much looking forward to using Image Playground for Keynote, as I regularly spend far too long finding appropriate images for my presentations. From what I’ve seen so far, I should be able to create suitable ones in seconds for each slide. I don’t need photorealistic, just clear and relevant. 

😎🇮🇪☘️ 

The Irishman who came in from the Cold. 

Kidding aside as an academic I rely on Word exclusively namely for its vast library of add-ons and ties to various components. Couldn't do without them. So far as Excel is concerned I use the functionality of VBA - underpinning of Excel - at least two to three times a week. 

Powerpoint I am less concerned about. 

I fully realise that Pages, Numbers and Keynote are free. But they just lack the real world functionality. 

That said, I would never use any other hardware than a Mac. 

I wrote my Masters thesis, and all papers for the degree, on Pages (the old version, which was more functional than the replacement designed to work on iPads, but may now be good again) in 2012. I regularly use OpenOffice. I begrudgingly use MS Office but Excel beats the pants off of Numbers in my use…

jas99

sidrictheviking said:

Pema said:

That's brilliant. Now we need to round up roster of users from Antartica and Upper Mongolia who actually use the Apple equivalent of Office. In my entire time in IT and as a Uni Phd student I have yet to see anyone using other than Word, Excel, Powerpoint. 

Greetings from Mongolian Antarctica!
As a regular (and long-time) user of both Pages and Keynote I’m surprised to read your post. I’ve used Word and PowerPoint over the decades but moved to Pages and Keynote exclusively many years ago. Bring free certainly helped. However, the main reason is ease of use. I work almost exclusively from an iPad and find Keynote, in particular, to be intuitive and very user friendly. When I need to work with Office documents I simply import them into the Apple equivalent and work with them there. When necessary, I export them back to their Office versions and it’s a painless exercise. 

Sadly, as I live in the EU (Ireland), I won’t have access to these new feature until April. I am very much looking forward to using Image Playground for Keynote, as I regularly spend far too long finding appropriate images for my presentations. From what I’ve seen so far, I should be able to create suitable ones in seconds for each slide. I don’t need photorealistic, just clear and relevant. 

ߘ箰☘️ 

This American engineer and manager brought his Mac into the office over a decade ago to escape the hell that is Microsoft and never looked back. 

I, too, convert every Microsoft document to a Pages, Numbers, or Keynote file and move on from there. 

The only time I use Excel is when I need to use VBA. VBA is disappointingly underpowered, however, because much to my dismay it uses only one processor core. 

I am impressed every day by the fundamental superiority in user interface that Numbers offers its users. Instead of being confined to a single vast grid of cells, I can have multiple tables each of a different configuration doing exactly what I want and feeding information to one another. I can place visual elements like graphs, charts, and pointers anywhere I want and anywhere it’s appropriate. It’s really beautiful to use. It has helped my creativity immensely. When I use Excel now, I feel constrained and unable to think. I strongly recommend for 99% of what you do, you try Numbers. You will be enlightened.

get serious

I've boycotted M$ Office since version 5 after spending over $1000 on version upgrades from Multiplan to Excel 4. Yes I'm still bitter and expert at holding a grudge. Certainly not always the best solution but I can say with Numbers and Keynote my spreadsheets and presentations were better received in print, PDF and on screen. I did use the company's Excel for day to day but most finished documents were polished in iWork. 

maccam

I wrote my PhD dissertation before the word processor era. Professionally, I started out with WordPerfect and eventually MS Word. I switched to Pages pretty quickly after it appeared because professional journal submissions in my field consist of essentially three separate sections: the manuscript (all text), tables, and illustrations. I originally used Adobe’s page layout software when I needed that for teaching or field trip guides, but that was a lot like using a sledgehammer to kill a fly. Page layout (integrating text, illustrations, and tables) was a nightmare in Word. It was a breeze in Pages. I started using Keynote as soon as it appeared for teaching and for professional meetings wherever I could use my own laptop. I never looked back. 

pascal007

Pema said:

That's brilliant. Now we need to round up roster of users from Antartica and Upper Mongolia who actually use the Apple equivalent of Office. In my entire time in IT and as a Uni Phd student I have yet to see anyone using other than Word, Excel, Powerpoint. 

We use Page and Numbers daily in our business workflow. It's much better than paying the yearly Microsoft Tax for a mostly equivalent product.

CheeseFreeze

I find the writing tools to be severely lacking compared to asking GPT or Claude the same questions (e.g proof read). 

Which makes sense, because a mobile device currently cannot realistically contain an LLM locally. It’s just that this limitation makes the entire feature worthless to me. 

Also, many of these tasks require a back-and-forth with an LLM before the resulting output is usable. Apple doesn’t expose this type of UX, and instead designed it around a ‘single ask’.
Similarly, Image Playground is way too limited to be using for real world projects and doesn’t generate anything I’m interested in. 

The reason why I’m not using Pages or Keynote is that, despite being vastly superior to Word or PowerPoint, Apple hasn’t invested in delivering a compelling “Gsuite” like alternative. When working in a business context, Apple’s solutions are too much positioned as a solo/consumer one. 

maccam

My biggest hope for Numbers is that someday Apple will include the matrix functions found in Excel.

jimh2

It would be great if Numbers supported saved functions. No need to be the level of Excel. Putting complex statements in a cell is more complicated than it needs to be. 

wonkothesane

StrangeDays said:

Not a witty or emphatic person? No problem, just push a button and you can pretend you are!

And this is just the beginning. Looking forward to conversations in forums, or between friends in a social media thread*, all written by their various “surrogates”, virtual partners like in “her”, teachers’ apps rating students’ “work” generated by apps. Presentations generates by AI, summarized in MoM by another AI…
we’re entering a new era. 

*https://futurism.com/the-byte/apple-ai-breakup-texts

danox

Pema said:

That's brilliant. Now we need to round up roster of users from Antartica and Upper Mongolia who actually use the Apple equivalent of Office. In my entire time in IT and as a Uni Phd student I have yet to see anyone using other than Word, Excel, Powerpoint. 

Too bad in school I used a page layout program to write my papers. No Microsoft crap in sight, many people would ask how come your document layout looks so good and is so well laid out. They were hoping I would tell them that I was using a Microsoft product but when I told them that I was using a page layout program, their eyes glazed over in disbelief.

Excel is the only program worth using the other two have been bad along with Windows Outlook for so long many people just don’t know any better, by the way Notability and Goodnotes are two of the best programs a modern day student can use.

The tools available to the modern student in comparison to the recent past in mind blowing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDSxesck_aU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxRbSYG1qkg

GJMcKenna

Pema said:

That's brilliant. Now we need to round up roster of users from Antartica and Upper Mongolia who actually use the Apple equivalent of Office. In my entire time in IT and as a Uni Phd student I have yet to see anyone using other than Word, Excel, Powerpoint. 

I used Powerpoint for a few years to makes slides.  Then in Jan 2003 I bought the first version of Keynote and never looked back.  The functionality difference was astounding.   Ironically, Powerpoint is only now just starting to catch up with that original 2003 Keynote version.  I bought every upgrade for years until they started giving away the upgrades for free.  Im in the surgical field, and am known in the field for the quality of my slide presentations ,  and every presentation/speech I've given for the last 20 years has been created using Keynote -- and only Keynote.  I will never create a presentation on Powerpoint because it's clumsy, and poorly designed, and lacks the features for making and editing slides quickely on the fly, like Keynote does.  And quite simply the slides produced by Powerpoint are ugly.    If I'm ever giving a conference presentation where only Powerpoint is available as technology at the conference, I STILL make my slides using Keynote so that they look awesome, and then I export every slide as a JPEG and paste that JPEG onto the Powerpoint blank slides.     

As for spreadsheets, when all I need is a bland and straight forward spreadsheet , I still go with Excel.  But Numbers allows you to create so may things that are only tangentially related to spreadsheets, so I use it when I need something creative in design. 

Word is the only Microsoft app that I use every day as my primary program.  I only use Pages if I am trying to create a documentt that incorporates figures, tables and graphics as an integral part of the document.   interestingly, I use Pages often to fix any damaged and flawed Word files.  If the Word file is corrupted, I can typically open the corrupted file in Pages, and then re-save it as a Word file again.  

MacPro

Chat GPT 4.o can create a Numbers .xlsx sheet based on a text description, I wonder why Apple's AI can't.

tht

GJMcKenna said:

Pema said:

That's brilliant. Now we need to round up roster of users from Antartica and Upper Mongolia who actually use the Apple equivalent of Office. In my entire time in IT and as a Uni Phd student I have yet to see anyone using other than Word, Excel, Powerpoint. 

I used Powerpoint for a few years to makes slides.  Then in Jan 2003 I bought the first version of Keynote and never looked back.  The functionality difference was astounding.   Ironically, Powerpoint is only now just starting to catch up with that original 2003 Keynote version.  I bought every upgrade for years until they started giving away the upgrades for free.  Im in the surgical field, and am known in the field for the quality of my slide presentations ,  and every presentation/speech I've given for the last 20 years has been created using Keynote -- and only Keynote.  I will never create a presentation on Powerpoint because it's clumsy, and poorly designed, and lacks the features for making and editing slides quickely on the fly, like Keynote does.  And quite simply the slides produced by Powerpoint are ugly.    If I'm ever giving a conference presentation where only Powerpoint is available as technology at the conference, I STILL make my slides using Keynote so that they look awesome, and then I export every slide as a JPEG and paste that JPEG onto the Powerpoint blank slides.     

As for spreadsheets, when all I need is a bland and straight forward spreadsheet , I still go with Excel.  But Numbers allows you to create so may things that are only tangentially related to spreadsheets, so I use it when I need something creative in design. 

Word is the only Microsoft app that I use every day as my primary program.  I only use Pages if I am trying to create a documentt that incorporates figures, tables and graphics as an integral part of the document.   interestingly, I use Pages often to fix any damaged and flawed Word files.  If the Word file is corrupted, I can typically open the corrupted file in Pages, and then re-save it as a Word file again.  

Yup. Keynote is the best app for making presentation charts. The pixel level control, the proper use of white space, the ease of layout tools, the Latex style equation editor. It's awesome. Every time I have to use Powerpoint, it's frustrating.

Excel is the best spreadsheet program for our uses though. Part of it is that we are an Office365 shop, and it is pretty hard to use something not Excel, while presentations and reports are ok with PDF. Only use Word when people send me Word documents. Don't use Pages. If I need to write a large document, I use Latex. Word is an absolutely horrifying application to use for the types of documents I write. Oh, just cringey just thinking about it.

Note sure how any GenAI program would help me. It would be a more advanced grammar checker, but I'm fighting a lot of the suggestions I get from Office365 too. That doesn't sound like too much of a win? It's not going to help me make plots or explain them. It can put out a Latex template or example file I can alter, maybe. How that would be different from stackoverflow is probably boiling down to whether I want to read the GenAI summary or something's direct post about it.