iWork: How practical?

[2Evan]

Getting ready to purchase an iPad when it finally sells here. I'd like to know if I will be able to import Word (and Xcel) documents to my iPad. And can other people open my Pages docs if they work on a Bill Gates machine? These would be two of main features I'm looking for.

Opening .pdf docs is also be for me.

Thks for your help

 

[goobot]

via itunes

 

[zedsdead]

Goodreader is great for viewing PDFs.

 

[czachorski]

Yes and no. Pagesncan read and export to word. The iPad can display both word and excel documents in many ways. Numbers can not export to excel on themipad, but can on the Mac version..

There are some limitations with some things like graphs and certain formatting that may not come across perfectly for editing. For viewing, I've found word and excel to work very well on my iPhone and iPad.

 

[jimboutilier]

The iPad does not have a readily accessible file system so you have to get things on and off of it via iTunes or email or a program like good reader or (or many more)

The iPad knows how to view a lot of different types of files and many of the file sharing programs add even more but with varying degrees of accuracy.

Pages and the other iWork apps allow you to import or export from office apps, but again with various degrees of success. The iPad versions are extremely limited so it really depends on how complex the documents you are dealing with are.

For my purposes the iPad iWork apps are pretty useless as they don't support many of the office features commonly used in my documents. I can still review an office doc ok by printing to a PDF then issuing iannotate to mark it up but that's still not like adding comments in Word.

Just be aware that what iWork does is cool and if it's all you need it could be great, but it has a lot of gaps and you'll have to try to see if it works for you or if the gaps make it impractical.

 

[Chupa Chupa]

You can export to PDF and .doc. You can also upload to iWork.com which is platform neutral.

 

[MikhailT]

Getting ready to purchase an iPad when it finally sells here. I'd like to know if I will be able to import Word (and Xcel) documents to my iPad. And can other people open my Pages docs if they work on a Bill Gates machine? These would be two of main features I'm looking for.

Opening .pdf docs is also be for me.

Thks for your help

You can import Word/Excel/PPT docs into iWork, just not every formatting will work. It'll import most of the files without any issues. As for other people, you can upload to iwork.com right from the iPad. iWork will let other people download your files in multiple formats from Pages, Word and PDF.

For PDFs, GoodReader is the best PDF application on the iPad for this, they are adding more features over time (Annotation soon). It can download/upload files on its own from GoogleDocs, Dropbox, any WebDav and so on. Check it out seriously. It's really a powerful PDF suite.

 

[EthanNixon]

I just bought Pages to do some projects while not at home. Like you, I wanted to find an easy way to share files among computers, and Apple already has a feature for this. iWork.com can wirelessly share from your iPad to any computer via a browser. Once you purchase any of the iWork applications from the iPad, or on the Mac, you can activate your iTunes account to use with iWork.com. This also let's you share your files with other people as well.

 

[2Evan]

Thks

thks so much people GREAT help! always a bit apprehensive I won't be able to perform taken-for-granted tasks