Pages for iPhone and iPad is a great way to do word processing on the go, but iCloud may not keep your documents as seamlessly synced as you expected.

Apple’s Pages is the word processing component of their iWork productivity suite of software, and a companion app to Numbers for spreadsheets and Keynote for presentations. Universal apps that work on iPhone and iPad, all three have proven to be popular choices for document management on the go and have just recently been updated to support iOS 5.1 and the new iPad‘s Retina display.

If you’re a new iPad or iPhone owner and need a way to create and edit documents on the go, Pages is Apple’s iCloud integrated solution.

Document organization

The documents screen of Pages displays your documents as a grid. You can create folders that contain multiple documents, similar to how you create folders of apps on your home screen. From here you can also delete, rearrange, and duplicate documents, add documents from iTunes, iDisk, or WebDAV, and create new document.

Templates

Pages comes with 16 different templates to help you get started with your project.

Modern Photo, Classic, Formal, and Personal Photo letters
Modern Photo and Classic Resume
Project Proposal and Visual Report
Poster and Flyer
Term Paper and Syllabus
Party Invite and Thank You Card
Recipe

All of them are fully customizable so that you can make them your own.

Formatting

When creating a document, you'll find a bar with formatting options you use most often: font type and size, bold, italics, underline, justification, and tabs. You can also easily adjust your margins and paragraph indent by dragging the arrows on the ruler at the top of the screen.

Tapping the paintbrush icon will give you more formatting options like paragraph and list styles, font color, columns, and line spacing.

Inserting media, tables, charts, and shapes

To insert media, tables, charts, and shapes into your document, just tap the + sign and choose what you'd like to insert. From the media tab, you can select photos from your Camera Roll, Photo Stream, or albums. The Tables tab has 24 different table designs to choose from. In the Charts tab, you'll find 9 different 2D and 8 different 3D charts, each in 6 different colors, and in the Shapes tab, you'll find 15 different shapes available in 6 different colors.

When inserting your media, you can scale it and move it around your document. If you drag it to an edge, the text will wrap around it, and if you put it in the middle somewhere, the text will separate above and below it.

Tables can be easily editable by just tapping on them. You can type information into each cell (even copy/paste from a spreadsheet app like Numbers) and adjust how many rows and columns your table is made up of.

Charts are treated the same way, except that you can rotate 3D ones around a little bit. Since charts require a set of data to have any sort of value, Pages allows you to edit the chart data (similar to a table) and select if you want to plot the rows or columns as a series.

Shapes are actually pretty fun to add to a Pages document because they are also adjustable. For example, if you select a star, you can add more points to it and adjust how skinny the points are.

Document Setup

If you tap the Tools button, you'll find options for sharing, searching your document, settings, help, and Document Setup.

Tapping Document Setup will bring you to a new screen that shows a blank document page with a header, a footer, and margins. Dragging the margin lines will adjust the margins and tapping the header or footer allows you to edit them with page numbers, line breaks, or with your own pasted information.

If you take a look at the bottom right corner of the page, you'll notice that's it's turned up a little. Tapping here will fold up the bottom of the paper and reveal two different paper size choices: US Letter and A4. Unfortunately, those are the only sizes available.

In the upper right corner, you'll find a + sign. From here, you can add media, tables, charts, and shapes, similarly to how you enter them into your actual document. The difference is that if you add these items from the document setup screen, they actually work as the background of your document so that text will appear over them. This is how you can change the color of your page, add borders, and get creative when designing things like posters and flyers. Each item you add can be further edited by tapping the paintbrush icon.

Once you're done creating your document, you can email it, print it, share to iWork.com, send to iTunes, or copy to iDisk or WebDAV. Surprisingly, you cannot share (or "Open in") iBooks. Although, if you email it yourself, you can then "Open in" iBooks from the email.

Pages also has support for iCloud so that you can keep all your documents synced between iPhone, iPad, and Mac. This works fabulously for iPhone and iPad, but the experience is a bit clunky for the Mac - it doesn't "just work". To get your document onto your Mac, one would think you'd just have to launch Pages and be able to find it under the File menu. No such luck. Instead, you have to go to iCloud.com and download your document from the iWork section. This is very inelegant to say the least. Most 3rd party apps with iCloud support handle syncing to the Mac better than this. Apple should be embarrassed.

The Good

Easy to use
16 nice templates to choose from
Photos, graphs, charts, and shapes are very easy to edit, customize, and insert
Document Setup is a great way to design the background of your project and is great for posters and flyers
iCloud between iOS devices works great

The Bad

Syncing with iCloud to your Mac is, for lack of a better word -- lame
Can't "Open in" iBooks without emailing it yourself first
Only US Letter and A4 paper sizes
No Dropbox support

The bottom line

If you're looking for an easy to use, well designed word processor for you iPad, Pages is an excellent choice. But if you are a big Dropbox user or want to sync with MS Word, you're going to want to look elsewhere. Personally, I'm happy with Pages and I've never felt the need to shop for a different word processing app.

$9.99 - Download Now (opens in new tab)

Former app and photography editor at iMore, Leanna has since moved on to other endeavors. Mother, wife, mathamagician, even though she no longer writes for iMore you can still follow her on Twitter @llofte.

13 Comments

A problem for me when working with iOS Pages is, when using templates, to have to make a copy of the template first and using that to create a new doc (renaming it as you go) rather than simply opening a template, altering it as needed and then changing the file to a new name, still retaining the original template. I agree, its only one additional step, but its ass-backwards in how one creates docs elsewhere.
But the biggest boo-boo you saved for the final paragraph. All this hype about iCloud and syncing and yet the user hasn't direct sync access to the docs - either from the IDevice or, similarly, on the iDevice from, say, Pages on the Mac. Again, downloading/uploading from a website is one additional (stupid) step. I understand the next Mac OS may solve that, but if you're hoping for seamless now, it ain't happening. And there is no direct, tidy, Dropbox sync available, either.
In the interim (and, incidentally, working for both Mac and PC), I'm using Documents to Go and its Desktop sync and trying out Dropbox with CloudOn - or at least until Microsoft gets their act together and offers Word for iOS.
I was disappointed with iCloud as well. I don't like having to continuously download and upload my documents in OSX Pages to receive them in ISO Pages. Maybe an upgrade is on the way.
I do a lot of writing on Pages (2 novels and a lot of editing). Two things I would like to see: First is dropbox support. Yeah, I doubt it's coming but it would be awesome. For now the workaround is to email the doc to myself and then upload to dropbox that way. A bit of a pain, but I can deal. The second is slightly better saving in MS Word format. I don't know what changed, but in the last few versions of Pages this has been wonky and has created some slightly corrupted Word files.
I'm considering giving Documents to Go a try. However, I will admit that the constant rumors of an ipad version of Office have me waiting to see if that's ever going to be a reality or not. If so, I'd probably go in that direction. Not that I love Word by any stretch of the imagination, but for compatibility between devices.
You may also want to consider Office2. Good features and cheaper than Docs To Go (no need to upgrade to Premium to use Dropbox).
There is another Dropbox way for now, guys! It's not much better than emailing though, not a true sync.
Through Dropbox, you can setup emailing. You get a special Dropbox email address so that you can email anything to that address which puts it into a ln ATTACHMENTS folder within your Dropbox.
With that, and Dropbox installed on your Mac or PC, you can drag stuff to the folder on your desktop, use the Dropbox app on your iOS device to Open In... Pages, edit, and then email the edited file to your Dropbox email for further desktop editing if needed.
I use this method if needed which is rare for me. I dont use My desktop hardly at all these days! Hope this workaround helps some of you!
Tom, I googled this topic and found that Dropbox does not include the ability to set up a Dropbox email address. I found a guide on Digital Inspiration which includes a way of doing it but it requires a Windows application called Mail Attachment Downloader and so will not work on a Mac unless you run in in a virtual Windows machine, which is more trouble than I can cope with. However you can open a document which is in your Dropbox folder using the Dropbox app - I've just done it for a Numbers spreadsheet and taken it into Numbers to edit, but I am sure it will work with Pages too. You can't round-trip it by saving it back to the Dropbox folder so you are still restricted to uploading the changed document to iCloud or emailing it.
Has anyone tried setting up a WebDAV server on a Mac and working from and to that? The Numbers app has the ability to copy a document from iDisk (which is not long for this world) or a WebDAV server, and to save it to iDisk or a WebDAV server. I don't have time to set up a WebDAV server but I have just tried this with iDisk and it works perfectly with a simple spreadsheet, which I copied from iDisk using iOS Numbers, performed a minor edit by filling in a blank cell, and saved back to iDisk, over-writing the original. The saved version opened in Numbers on the Mac with no problem and looks identical to the original except of course for the new entry. Again I would be very surprised if this didn't work in Pages too.
This appears to me to be the best solution to working between iOS and MacOS systems using Pages and Numbers (I have no use for Keynote but it may work too) and I have a web hosting plan with WebDAV included so I don't even have to set up my Mac as a WebDAV server.
The solution is so straightforward that I am more than surprised to find that Apple hasn't implemented something similar. After all, the Calendars app and iCal on Macs use a WebDAV server in iCloud to keep data in sync - add an entry on any device and it rapidly appears on all the other devices.
Ian
Ian
Ian
Ian
Really we shouldn't be discussing this - it should just work without our having to worry about what's happening. Maybe Mountain Lion will be the answer but there is still the problem that Pages and Numbers on iOS are seriously crippled compared with the MacOS versions.
Sorry about the multiple signatures at the end of my last message but there doesn't appear to be a way of editing it after submitting it. The last point after the signatures still applies.
Ian
Great websiteThank you for sharing your ideas on this site.
Can you tell me if Pages can import images straight from the iPad camera (new iPad 3)?
I need a means to record customer details plus image for group photography shoots. Otherwise can you recommend other apps that can [import from camera]
Great website BTW
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Oh, FFS don't make fools of us. We've all seen the VNC icon and the lack of BT one...
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