Apple has responded to the criticism heaped upon it by users when it removed some features of its iWork productivity suite – Keynote, Pages, and Numbers – and has promised to reinstate "some of these features" in releases over the next six months.

In a posting on its support website, Apple also instructs users how to revert files changed to the new iWorks format – provided they didn't trash their copy of the previous release, iWork '09.

Immediately after the new "rewritten from the ground up" version of the three iWork apps were released on October 22 along with OS X Mavericks, angry iWorks devotees launched a veritable Scheißesturm of complaints.

Apple heard, and obeyed – well, will obey, eventually.

Among the features to be reinstated are customizable toolbars in all three apps, keyboard shortcuts for styles in Pages, multi-column and range sort in Numbers, and old transitions and builds in Keynote. A full list of the reinstatements can be found here.

If you didn't toss out your copy of iWork '09 – Apple recommends that you look for it in your Applications folder [Duh... — Ed] – you have two options. If you haven't edited a document yet in the new versions, you can revert to the iWork '09 version by selecting File > Revert To.

If you have edited an older document and want to preserve the edits you made in the new version, you can save it as an iWork '09 document: select File > Export To, then choose the appropriate iWork '09 app from the list.

To your humble Reg reporter, it's a bit puzzling why anyone would use Numbers for anything other than slick-looking charts, or Pages for ... well ... practically anything, but app choice is a matter of taste, after all.

Except for Keynote, which has always been hands-down superior to Microsoft's creaky PowerPoint. ®