Speaking of syncing back to the Mac, while there is no automatic syncing, you can manually select to download an iWork file from the iCloud website. The file winds up in the Downloads folder on your Mac. If the file was originally created on your Mac, the downloaded version will be missing any Mac-only features. It is essentially a Mac-compatible copy of the iOS version of the file. : Immediately after uploading a file from the Mac to iCloud, you cannot turn around and download it; you first have to open it in an iOS iWork app, so that it is converted to the iOS format.

It would seem that the only sure way for Apple to avoid these sync issues would be for the iOS and Mac versions of iWork apps to support the exact same features and document format. I don’t see this happening anytime soon.

Now let’s move on to iCloud and iOS devices.

The good news here is that iWork documents moved from the Mac to iCloud, as well as iWork documents created on iOS devices and synced to iCloud, will sync perfectly among all your iOS devices. At least they should. If you find that this is not happening, try turning off—and then back on—Documents & Data in Settings -> iCloud on each iOS device. If that doesn’t work, as a last resort, delete your iCloud account from your iOS devices and re-add the account to each device. See this for more details.

On final potential and serious danger: According to several threads in Apple Support Communities, such as , there is chance that documents synced via iCloud may get deleted from your iOS devices and iCloud. This can happen, for example, simply by powering down an iOS device and turning it back on.