Why won't iCloud let me download Pages documents uploaded from a computer?

It often happens that I create a Pages document on my home laptop, upload it to iCloud, then want to download it from iCloud at school. For some reason, iCloud doesn't support this—I need to, at some point between those two steps, open Pages on an iOS device synched with my iCloud account. Then it'll work fine.

I assume this has something to do with a preview being included in the file, as in iCloud it shows up as a generic .pages document rather than the customary document preview image thing, but I can't see why. Pages does include a preview in its saves, and "Include preview in document by default" is checked.

What's happening, and is there any way I can get around it without use of an iPad or iPhone?

Solution 1:

The same things happens to me. After some digging around I found this from Apple:

Important: You cannot download a document from icloud.com to your Mac or Windows computer until the document has been opened on an iOS device.

My guess is that this is a symptom of iCloud's "work in progress" status, and that this functionality will eventually be there. Considering that you are only asking to download the exact same file that you uploaded, though, it is a pretty silly restriction.

Update:

For me, the behavior has recently changed. Now if you upload a file from your computer to icloud.com, you can download the original file to any computer from icloud.com. You still must download the document to an iOS device before you can download the file as a PDF or other format.

Solution 2:

The format used by iOS Pages is slightly different to the format used by OSX Pages. (who knows why Apple though this was clever?)

As the OSX iWork apps don't have iCloud document sync built in, iCloud.com primarily works with iOS devices.

But with Mountain Lion, it looks like at least the file formats will become interchangeable, if not the same, as the iWork document sync appears to built into the OS itself, rather than just the iWork apps (probably the reason why the iWork apps still dont' have iCloud built in)

You are pretty much stuck (I say stuck, in many ways better) with services like DropBox, in the hope that iCloud/com is vastly improved for Mountain Lion.