Pages and Numbers Not Syncing in iCloud

I agree. I got Pages for Mac and iPhone pretty much based on the assumption that this works. It's an unbelievable flaw and I'm tempted to ask for a refund on both products!

dave_a wrote:

This whole issue is a big disappointment to me but what seems even more crazy is that if you create a Pages Document on your Mac and upload it to the iCloud Web interface as suggested you can then access the document via the web interface on say an iPad or iPhone. Once you do this there are options for opening the document in iBooks and in various other Apps - but not in the iPhone or iPad version of Pages! I have found that the best method to get round this is to email the Pages document to myself and then to open the email attachment on the iPad from where you do get the option to open the Document in the Pages App on the iPad!!!

Then you don't have iOS5 or not pages v.1.5 on it. Or you upload not office files but pdfs :

Whatever pages/doc/docx you upload from Mac to icloud.com will instantly appear in the document manager of iOS5 pages.app.

PDFs of course cannot be opened in pages, but will open in pdf-apps on your iOS device. iBooks is a PDF and epub reader and storage manager, so naturally it will be a choice. Asof today Adobe has its good old Acrobat Reader on the AppStore, this would be a more pdf-only reader with no fancy stores attached to it.

TonySigrist wrote:

.. Very poor but it shows that even apples staff would expect iCloud to work in this way otherwise to use their words "whats the point in it". ...

The Point in it is simply that Apple assumes a household has only one or more iDevices and creates documents on them and the finalized files then can be downloaded through the browser, for local backups or whatever.

Because syncing to iPod/iPad/iPhone works, just like advertised. You start a document on device 1 and it is on device 2 the second you close it on device 1. It also goes then to icloud.com/iwork.

So - this is just for iOS5 and the respecting iWork v1.5 apps on it. Macs/PCs are not in that game.

Message was edited by: Sjazbec

I think he meant iWork.com not iCloud. When you go to share it says use iWork.com - no suggestion of iCloud. I guess it makes a PDF which is why it doesn't open in pages as you said.

Apple - iCloud - Your content. On all your devices.

www.apple.com/icloud/ - United States

iCloud is cloud service done right. It stores your music, photos, apps, calendars, documents, and more. And wirelessly ... - Cached

iCloud - iTunes in the Cloud

"All devices"

Not how it was billed I'm afraid, or how it was sold when I bought my mac. Why on earth would I not want the documents to update on one of my devices. That means whenever I update a pages document on my ipad or iphone I then have to manually upload the new version to my mac. Rubbish and as I say not how this was billed. Clearly not as Apple staff expected either otherwise I'd have got the answer in 30 seconds, not a nil response after nearly an hour of faffing about with two advisors, one of whom was a specialist.

It doesn't sync? IT DOESN'T SYNC?

What's the point of my Pages document on the iPad being "pushed" to my iPhone? I need it pushed to my MacBook! Hope this will be fixed soon, coz otherwise docs in the cloud is useless to me.

I've just been poking about with this myself, and here's what I think may be going on in the Apple engineers' heads:

1. iWork apps for iOS don't support all of the same features as the desktop apps - cell comments in Numbers is a simple example, but there are others, like some complex formulae
2. When you upload a document from the desktop environment, iCloud.com/xxx converts it to a format usable by the iOS app - and it warns you when certain feature are about to get stripped. In my case when I uploaded a Numbers '09 doc from my MBP, it warned me that my comments were being removed, as were references to two fonts that weren't available, and some other (unnamed) complex formulae
3. Once the docs are in iCloud, the iOS apps (which support more-or-less the same feature sets as each other) can seamlessly share without any problem, but if you were to download back to the desktop, you won't have all those fancy features you originally set up.
4. Therefore, 'they' don't want you to be piqued because all of sudden your comments and formulae are gone on your desktop version.

Now, I'm not saying this is a Good Situation - in fact, Dataviz seems to have struggled - and more or less overcome - the same problem with DocumentsToGo (the bit about allowing a stripped-down editor to update a document without removing the richer features). It would be good to see Apple implement whatever conversion algorithms Dataviz are using, and then expand to close this rather unfortunate usability gap.

As it is though, iCloud is (almost) great for those who are leaving the desktop behind entirely. And I sympathise. With iOS5 + iPhone 4S + iPad 2, I'm almost there myself.

[And this is essentially what Sjazbec is pointout, above - cheers to you, Sjazbec.]

dougsymon wrote:

Apple - iCloud - Your content. On all your devices.

www.apple.com/icloud/ - United States

iCloud is cloud service done right. It stores your music, photos, apps, calendars, documents, and more. And wirelessly ... - Cached

iCloud - iTunes in the Cloud

"All devices"

Yes. it STORES . It stores your documents from iOS5 to icloud.com and also to ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~pages (~numbers // ~keynote ) /Documents on your Lion Harddisk.

You need to nitpick here, because "it stores" is used in this advertising as something theoretical.. The average customer surely interprets it as "it syncs to my Mac and to my phone" .. Walking a very thin line there in the ads.

Yes, color me dissapointed as well. I have a Mac Pro, MacBook Air, and an iPhone. Clearly I create most of my documents on the desktop, and want them synced to my laptop and phone when I'm on the go. This doesn't work, I have to manually upload and download my docs from iCloud.com/iWork... laughable. It's faster to email the docs to myself which I could do 10 years ago.

Clearly, based on other threads that I have read pertaining to this subject, there is a major bug. iCloud/iWork IS supposed to do what Apple claims it should do, but it simply isn't working as it should. In my case, for example, I can create a document on my iPhone and it will not appear on iCloud. I can upload a document to iCloud, and it will not appear on my iPhone. In fact, even though I save my test documents with a preview, I only see the Pages icon in the documents that I upload to iCloud.

Some people have been able to successfully sync among devices by resetting their phones and setting them up as new phones. But I'm not prepared to do that until Apple tells us it's the only way to get things working as they should.

It appears that your analysis is correct, as the iOS Numbers does lose features when an iMac Numbers docurment is uploaded to a mobile device. However, this really limits the usefulness of Numbers for iOS as I need to be able to work on my spreadsheets in both iOS and OSX Lion and be able to have each have the most recent updated version. It is very disappointing to learn that the documents can, I assume, only be tranfered back and forth manually, at best, like before iClound, via iTunes.

Apple, if you're listening, get that fixed.

My head hurts reading this stuff.

All I want to do (and I assumed I could) is write a document on my Macbook. When I go out or get a good idea while doing something else, edit it the same document on my iPad and return to working on it at home on the Macbook. Simple.

Seems like it is asking for the world and I need a degree in computer operating systems to do that.

Please tell me I have got it wrong and I can do this with ease.

Yes I did mean iWork.com Doug rather than iCloud but the fact remains that I have found it impossible to prevent the Pages App on my iMac from sharing both a Pages and a pdf version to iWork.com (even though I un-check the boxes for pdf and word versions in the sharing pane!) - and then it always seems to be the pdf that opens on either my iPhone and my iPad which is why it will not then open in Pages on either iOS5 device - and yes I do have the very latest versions of the Operating systems and all the relevant Apps on My iMac, iPhone 4 and iPad 1.

I discovered, by accedent that it is how you log in that determines which screen you get. I have both a mac.com and a me.com address. I don't know why or how, but that is not the issue here. Both came from years of paying for mobile me(and .mac before that). I thought that the two were interchangeable, but they are not. If I log into icloud.com with @mac.com I get the advertising screen, but if I log with @me.com I get the proper screen where I can drag and drop files. I get mail addressed to either in my icloud mailbox however.