The iWork for iPad suite of productivity tools has received a major update today. The New York Times reports that the iWork 1.2 update has introduced many useful new features, including the ability to import and export directly from your MobileMe iDisk or any similar WebDAV service (which excludes Dropbox, sadly for all you Dropbox fans). Previously Pages was the only iWork app that could export to MS Office, but now both Keynote and Numbers can also export to Office formats.

The ability to group and ungroup objects has also now been added, as has the ability to open .txt files from Mail, in Pages, and .csv files in Numbers, using "Open As". Pages also gets the ability to import and export existing footnotes, endnotes, sections and tables of contents, although you still can't actually create them yourself.

Possibly the one added feature that I'm most pleased about is the option to display the word count for your document in Pages, which can be toggled on and off in the Tools menu, and which really shows that Apple listens to the little niggles and complaints that customers have.

Overall, a very thorough and welcome update!

Source: The New York Times, iTunes

I have got the pages app and has improved alot. Just waiting now for IOS 4 to come out to be able to print.