Apple's iWork for iCloud looks to take on Google Drive with enhanced collaboration, formatting features

After a long wait, Apple has finally introduced an upgrade to their iWork for iCloud suite of apps. This new update is slated to give tough competition to cloud-based  alternatives such as Google Drive and Docs. Some of the added features include Pages word processor, Keynote presentation maker and Numbers spreadsheet manager. There are also plans to incorporate apps for iOS and OS X in the near future.

The collaboration feature will allow up to 100 people to access a single file in either Pages, Keynote or Numbers. This feature which is already quite popular with the Google Drive cold prove to be a star on Apple’s shoulders. On the iWork suite, the upper limit of people working simultaneously on a single file has been increased from 50 to 100.

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Apple has significantly improved its storage capacity on iWork for iCloud, allowing users to upload individual files up to 1 GB in size. This is a notch above what Google Drive allows for individuals. iWork allows image sizes of up to 10 MB which is almost double of its previous limit of 5 MB and the 1GB file size is a considerable increase over its earlier constraint of 200 MB per document.

All of the above applications will incorporate 2D and interactive chart features, complete with formatting improvements and multiple colour changes. Pages have also gained the ability to export to ePub format, allowing you to publish e-books. Apple has managed to restructure basic requirement like designing tables and object layering in the documents, making it easy to navigate and increasing readability. Numbers has added exporting to CSV which basically allows easier integration with Microsoft Excel. Keynote has also been given extra features like the ability to show or hide slide numbers.