iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Sharing with Pages and Keynote

One of the best features of iWork is how seamless all the programs feel. They share the same icons, tools, and even features, often making it seem more like you’re using a single program than three separate ones. New features in iWork ’09 make that bond even stronger by giving Pages and Keynote documents the ability to communicate behind the scenes with your Numbers spreadsheets to fetch chart and mail-merge information.

Using Linked Charts

Numbers provides a much friendlier workspace for making charts than Pages or Keynote, which both rely on the clunky Chart Data Editor to spoon-feed figures to your charts and graphs. If you work with data of any size or update that data frequently, then managing your chart’s numbers in your spreadsheet is the way to go, no matter where you want the chart to appear. In iWork ’09, Pages and Keynote know how to work with that strategy; when you paste your spreadsheet’s chart into a Pages document or Keynote slideshow, iWork forges a link between the two documents. When you update the data in Numbers, you can refresh the chart in Keynote or Pages to display the new data.

For more on this feature, check out the coverage for Pages (Copying spreadsheet or table data into your chart) and Keynote (Using Numbers Charts in Your Slideshow).

Mail Merge with Pages

Pages can use any Numbers spreadsheet as a data source to generate mass-mailings. A typical mail merge plucks address or other contact info from the spreadsheet to address ...