iWork

One of the best features of Apple's iWork suite (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) is the ability to easily collaborate with friends and coworkers. Rather than simply sharing your documents for others to view or critique or go off on their own tangent with, collaborating allows all parties involved to edit the document, and everybody will see the edits. It is an incredibly useful feature whether you are working on a Keynote presentation with coworkers or simply sharing a spreadsheet among friends to keep track of expenses on a trip.

While Apple's iWork is a perfectly good productivity suite that includes Pages, Numbers and Keynote, Microsoft still controls the lion's share of the market with its own collection of office tools that are practically household names - Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Besides simply keeping large amounts of numerical data well organized, the true utility of a spreadsheet lies in its ability to easily manipulate the data to derive sums, averages, maximums and so on. To do this, you need to use formulas in certain spreadsheet cells. For a simple example, you could have the prices of all the items you've sold on Ebay in column A and their shipping costs in column B.

Using PowerPoint or Keynote to deliver presentation slideshows just got easier with the Apple Watch. Now presenters can remote control slides right from the watch, with no other external remote needed. Keynote for iOS version 2.5.3 adds support for the Keynote Remote Apple Watch app. Previously, Keynote users could use their iOS devices to remote control a slide presentation on a Mac. Apple Watch functionality operates in much the same manner.

Apple has officially opened the iWork suite of productivity software to anyone with an updated web browser. Ownership of a Mac or iOS device is not required to create an iCloud account. Once the user has an Apple ID, the web-based versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote are free along with 1GB of iCloud storage to save related files.

iWork for iCloud was first launched in 2013 for beta testing, and later extended to all users with an Apple ID. Creating an Apple ID at www.icloud.com is as simple as clicking the text "Create one now" at the bottom of the sign in page. Users will need to enter a name, email address, date of birth and security questions for password protection.