Tim Cook
CEO Tim Cook speaking onstage at Apple’s “Field Trip” event in Chicago, Illinois on March 27, 2018. Reuters/John Gress

Aside from unveiling the revamped 9.7-inch iPad with Apple Pencil support and launching the “Everyone Can Create” program for teachers during its “Field Trip” event on Tuesday, Apple also announced the new features of its updated iWork apps for Mac and iOS devices.

The biggest addition to the iWork apps is support for Apple Pencil. From now on, users of Pages, Keynote and Numbers can use the peripheral on iPad Pro devices and the newly announced 9.7-inch iPad. They can draw, write and sketch in all three apps to enhance their projects and presentations, according to MacRumors.

Apple Pencil support also means iPad owners can now use the peripheral for navigational purposes within the apps instead of their fingers. Worth noting is the new Smart Annotation Beta feature of Pages that enables users to add comments and marks to a document using the Apple Pencil.

Other upgrades to the Pages app include the new book templates, drawing tools and editable shapes. The latest version also allows users to collaborate real time on documents stored in Box. There’s also a new option that automatically formats fractions as users type.

As for the Keynote update, Apple is giving users the ability to animate their drawings during slideshows. Just like Pages, Keynote now allows real-time collaborations on presentations stored in Box. The presentation app also gets a variety of new editable shapes and the option to adjust presentation slide size and aspect ratio.

Apart from Apple Pencil support, the Numbers app now has powerful new options for sorting and filtering tables. It has full bidirectional support for Arabic and Hebrew and improved, customizable import of CSV and text data. It has also earned a variety of new editable shapes that users can utilize in enhancing their spreadsheets.

Apple is updating both the iOS and macOS versions of the iWork apps. Hence, most of the aforesaid features found in the iOS updates are also present in the latest versions of the Pages, Keynote and Numbers apps for Mac devices.