It’s versatile, powerful, and its documents are multi-platform and collaborative. However, these iWork actions are a great stake in the ground for first-party apps - Apple has demonstrated their intent to make apps like this have feature parity when it comes to Shortcuts support, they've pushed quality-of-life updates for users wanting to take more advantage of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers, and they're honing in on the particular use cases for each app and making them easier.IWork Automation: Pages AppleScript Supportįor emerging and established creatives alike, Pages is the “go-to” app in a “go-go” world. Plus, Numbers should be able to insert data in the background without opening the app - that experience is very antithetical to the Shortcuts experience and unfortunately means many people won't utilize it.

In the next iteration of these, I'd love to see more ways to interact with my iWork files: getting data out, inserting data, and being able to extract details from the file's parameters would enable much more programmatic access to everything. Screenshot of iWork shortcuts in the Shortcuts app (Image credit: iMore) Overall, these set of Shortcuts actions for Pages, Keynote, and Numbers are welcome - each application is on a level playing field across iOS and Mac, they provide great access to files and the templates in the app, and Apple gave Keynote and Numbers extra attention for their app-specific features. Plus, your 'logging' shortcuts work on mobile and desktop, so your workflow can be smooth anywhere.

When you run the shortcut, get the prompts, and input all your data, the action will then take you into the Numbers app and insert your values directly - this requirement to manually open the app is the one downside of the action and a weird limitation from Apple, as inserting values in the background would be much smoother.ĭespite the manual input, this action is extremely useful - you can use Shortcuts' scripting and Numbers to do all sorts of data entry that'd otherwise be very laborious to enter manually, especially from an iPhone or iPad. Using Shortcuts' other scripting actions, you can create/ask yourself to enter those values on the fly using a series of Ask For Input actions, with prompts like 'What's the description?', and 'What's the amount?', then add those results (and the current date) into the Values field (note: leave any columns blank if you don't want to add values). Screenshots of Personal Budget template in Numbers and shortcut to add to the spreadsheet.

Apple iwork pages