iWork ‘09 announced at MacWorld 2009

Aside from the new iLife ‘09 suite that was announced this morning, Apple is also showing off the new version of iWork, iWork ‘09. Here is a look at some of the highlights:

Keynote: New to Keynote, you can now identify objects within slides, and Keynote will take care of moving them around between slides. There is a Magic Move feature, which will do everything automatically, including resizing and rotating an object. There are new animations as well, featuring fly-ins on charts and graphs, rotating and grow on bars, zooming in on charts, etc. New deck themes have also been added.

As a side note, there is also a new Keynote remote control app available in the App Store that will allow you to use your iPhone or iPod touch to control your Keynote presentations. It will cost $0.99.

Pages: Pages ‘09 gets a few new features. First up is a fullscreen view that makes everything else on your screen disappear. Basically, you get the document you are typing on, and everything else fades to black, to help you focus. There are also new dynamic outlines, which let you outline what you are going to write before you actually start writing, and you can switch back and forth to reorganize your thoughts. Pages also gets a new mail merge feature, which works with Numbers, connecting to tables, and it also works with MathTpye and EndNote. Oh, and you get 40 new themes.

Numbers: Numbers 09 picks up easy formula writing, advanced chart options (like mixed chart types, error bars, trend lines) and new table categories. If you have a Pages document that is linked to data from a Numbers document, if you update it in Numbers, it is automatically updated in Pages. Nice. Lastly, Numbers also gets theme templates, which is rare for a spreadsheet application.

iWork ‘09 ships today, and sells for $79, or $99 for a family pack that is good on up to five Macs. If you purchase it with a new Mac, it costs just $49.