OneDrive Syncing for Keynote, Pages, and Numbers: Alternative to iCloud Drive

This is to help you if you’re trying to avoid syncing your iWork documents with iCloud because you already have a paid cloud storage like OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. I have 1TB in OneDrive, and that is what I wanted to use when I tried this. So, this will work with Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. But, I did it with Keynote.

Setting Up

To get started, go to your iPad Settings, go to Apps (bottom of the sidebar), and look for Keynote. Go to where it says Document Storage, and right now you can see that it’s iCloud Drive, right? But, you have a lot of options where your documents can go. You can store them in Adobe’s Creative Cloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, and even OneDrive. And that is all you have to do. I am not changing mine because I stopped using this setup for a reason we’ll get into in a bit. But before we do that, let’s look at the option in Pages and Numbers. They both have the same options. Apple Notes, unfortunately, does not have this option.

iCloud vs. OneDrive

Now, the reason I stopped using this with OneDrive is how it organised my slides, versus how iCloud does it. It might not bother everyone, but it really bothered me. In iCloud Drive, there is one folder for Keynote with all the presentations I have in the app. It’s very simple to understand, and finding a presentation is very easy. OneDrive, on the other hand, has several Keynote folders; five of them! Each of them is a different presentation. So, for every presentation you make, the app creates a folder in OneDrive, along with all your other work in the cloud storage. For some sanity, you’ll have to name these folders if you want to use this system. 

Another problem is that the app uploads every version of the document. So, I first created this presentation on the 21st of September. Then when I updated it on the 4th of October, it created another copy of the document in this folder. Keynote 4 was the straw that broke the camel’s back, for me. I was actively working on this presentation for several days, and the app just kept uploading new versions of it. That was when I made the decision to switch back to iCloud Drive because in iCloud the one document just gets updated.

Using OneDrive

Working with OneDrive from Keynote itself wasn’t difficult. When you open Keynote, through the Files app, you’re prompted to pick the file you want. You always want to make sure you’re picking the latest document. Right now, I just updated the document, and it didn’t create a copy of it. It was just confusing. On the Mac, just to see the syncing in action, it’s pretty much the same. You just go to OneDrive and open the Keynote from there. But it looks like it hasn’t updated our changes yet. That’s another issue you’ll have to deal with: the delays in syncing your documents.

Perhaps I’ll give it another try and see if I can figure out what creates the copies. I hope you found that helpful. Let me know if you have any other cool hacks I can try in my workflow.