Apple’s ramping up the iPad’s iWork offering. All three of Apple’s iWork applications have been updated with more features and friendly play with the all-too-ubiquitous Microsoft Office. Read on…

Keynote, the Apple alternative to PowerPoint, has been updated with the ability to export presentations to Microsoft PowerPoint (.PPT) format, along with the added bonus of saving presentation to iDisk or a WebDAV service of your choice. That means easier compatibility, and life in the cloud. There’s also a bunch of new animations, wipes and features to make interacting with objects easier.

Numbers, the spreadsheet app, which is like Microsoft’s Excel, now supports exporting to Excel (.XLS) format, along with shared ability for iDisk and WebDAV services. Numbers can now also open up CSV files from Mail and other apps.

Pages, the counterpart to Microsoft Word, also comes complete with iDisk and WebDAV features, along with (FINALLY) word count in the document. Opening .txt files from Mail is now supported, along with grouping objects, and importing footnotes, endnotes and a table of contents. Pages has already supported .DOC exporting from the beginning, but the addition of these goodies, (and especially footnotes) is increasing the usability of Pages considerably — turning it from a mere word-processing utility, to full-blown work app.

Apple’s certainly making an investment in these core apps, so it we’ll keep close tabs on how quickly they evolve with features, especially if Microsoft is at their heels.

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