By Graham K. Rogers

I must admit, I have been playing with the iWork beta for a couple of weeks now, but as good as it is, this was because I was using developer access. and so I was not really allowed to write anything about it at all. I also had no access to my data that was being synchronised in the cloud, between Mac, iPhone and iPad. I could gloat secretly; but that was all I could do. Until now, that is.

Apple has now opened up access to the beta to all with iCloud accounts and now I can flex my muscles. Logging in, I tried Keynote first and was to see that all the presentations that I have been using and synchronising in the cloud were there.

This is so easy to use. Although transitions between slides are available for use in the presentations, about the only thing missing is the way to make each individual line of text appear. This is called "animate" on the iOS version of the Keynote app; and is also available in the dektop (iWork) application. I just hope that this is to be added before the product comes out of beta.

Working on a presentation using a browser is somewhat liberating. I no longer take the Mac to work unless there is a specific task I need to use it for, and rely on the iPhone for presentations (small as the screen is, the display via a projector is excellent). With the iWork in iCloud, I could even run a presentation from a PC in a worse case scenario.

For those who have an iCloud account, I urge you to take a look at this.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.