Apple Pages hits 5.0, here’s a look at what’s new

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, PC / Laptop, Software

Apple has updated Pages to version 5.0 as part of a bunch of refreshed iWork and iLife updates in conjunction with its Apple iPad event today. Apple's word processor sees a host of new features integrated, including new writing tools, better performance, and a new design with a bunch of Apple-designed templates. Deep iCloud integration is here as well, allowing you to access yoru documents across all your OS X and iOS devices. Here's the full list of what's new in Pages:

• Stunning new user interface
• Over 60 Apple-designed templates
• Simplified toolbar gives you quick access to shapes, media, tables, charts, and sharing options
• New Format Panel automatically updates based on selection
• Enhanced change tracking, comments, and highlights; show and hide changes and comments on mouse-over
• Animate data with new interactive column, bar, scatter, and bubble charts
• Use gorgeous preset styles to make your text, tables, shapes, and images look beautiful
• Easy setup for headers, footers, and document body
• Use new 2D bubble charts
• Enhanced conditional highlighting makes it easy to automatically highlight cells based on numbers, text, dates, and durations
• Quickly and easily share a link to your work via Mail, Messages, Twitter, or Facebook
• Anyone with a shared document link will always have access to the latest version of the document and can edit it with you at iCloud.com
• Access and edit documents from iCloud.com using Pages for iCloud beta
• New unified file format across the Mac, iOS, and the web makes documents work seamlessly everywhere
• Turn on Coaching Tips for guided in-app help
• Pages is now available in Arabic and Hebrew
• Improved support for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean

You can download Pages now for free if you've purchased a Mac on or after October 1, 2013, otherwise you can grab it for $19.99.