It’s time for a friendly reminder because Apple’s online storage service for iWork documents, the iWork.com Public Beta, is closing up this Tuesday, July 31st. As of July 31st, you will not be able to access any of the documents you might have hosted on the site as part of Apple’s universal transition to iCloud.
For now, there isn’t an Apple-powered alternative to iWork.com as Apple is yet to integrate iCloud even into it’s own, Mac App Store-distributed office suite. There’s a potential that’s going to change in a rumoured-to-be-very-soon update to the iWork suite that will see such integration (Update: as expected, iWork has been updated to work with iCloud and Retina Displays, but it’s still not a full new version of iWork), but, for now, it’s time to backup anything you may have saved and start looking at alternatives.
Goodbye, iWork
Before you dismiss the concept of you having uploaded to the service, be sure to just head over to iWork.com and login. I have stuff in there that I have no other copy of elsewhere, and it’s always better to be safe than sorry should you have something important located there.
If you do have iWork documents in the service, it’s pretty simple to download them. Simply click the downwards-facing arrow and select a file format to download the document in. You can grab a copy in the relevant iWork format, as a PDF or as a Microsoft Office document. If for some reason you don’t think you’ll be using iWork as much going forward, you might want to download documents in multiple formats just to be sure they’ll stay usable on any computer you use.
The downwards arrow allows you to download your documents in one of three file formats.
As Apple suggests, you’ll also want to remove public links to iWork.com that you may have online. If you’ve used the service to, for example, share or embed a Keynote presentation, the link will break come Tuesday along with the rest of the storage. Do your visitors a favour, and take them down. You could upload your documents to a service like Scribd or SlideShare to embed in your site, or even upload them to Google Docs and embed them, if you want.
Hello, New Service
Unfortunately, at least, at the time of writing, Apple doesn’t have an alternative in place so you’re going to have to look at third-party alternatives. For finding an alternative, i’ll direct you to the Web.AppStorm roundup of cloud-based storage apps to help you pick out an alternative. Note that since then, iCloud has launched and introduced an ability to manually upload documents. While not yet integrated natively into iWork, it’s still an interim option.
iCloud, Maybe?
However, change could be afoot. It’s possible that alongside the release of iCloud, Apple will either update or release brand new versions of iWork which may include support for iCloud’s “Documents in the Cloud” feature which will allow syncing of documents via the cloud.
iCloud, maybe? For now, you can head to the iWork section and manually upload documents.
Although there’s not any native iCloud integration in the iWork suite yet, you can manually upload documents to the iWork section of iCloud by heading to iCloud.com/iWork, clicking on the gear icon in the top-right corner and uploading a document manually.
Such a feature would ultimately replace iWork.com very well, with a presumed ability to access documents both in the native apps and at iCloud.com. Apple’s wording suggests heavily that these features will be coming, but, for now, make sure you’re taking action to save a copy of any documents you may have stored in iWork.com.
You’ve got only a matter of days to go! With an OS upgrade right around the corner, you might want to go ahead and backup your iWork.com documents today rather than waiting any longer!