Get down to serious work with an iPad

The iPad has become a common work tool in offices all around the world. But what about documents, spreadsheets, and presentations—can we work with them on the iPad before Microsoft releases its office suite for Apple's tablet device?

Fortunately, the iPad offers a whole range of applications to work with office documents. Below, we review best among these.

iWork

pple targeted the business application market back when the company was designing its iPad. This became clear in 2010 when the company released the iPad version of its iWork office suite. The iWork suite is available from the Apple Store as 3 applications: Pages (a word processor), Numbers (a spreadsheet application), and Keynote (a presentation editor).

Unlike iWork, on a Mac, these applications are not bundled as an office suite and are offered separately in the App Store for $9.99 each. Nevertheless, Pages, Numbers and Keynote share the same interface and the same approaches to editing and saving files. There is one more thing that unites these apps — they are full-fledged office products.

The good thing about these applications is that they are completely optimized for the iPad`s touch screen. In other words, when working with them, you will feel comfortable as if the office suites were designed for touch screens from the start.

Format compatibility is one of the strong points of iWork. For instance:

●   With the current version of Pages, you can open MS Word documents including *.docx files as well as save your documents in a Word-compatible format

●   Numbers allows you to easily open and save Excel documents. Working with Excel diagrams is supported only in iWork apps.

●    Keynote provides you with the ability to edit PowerPoint presentations

●    And of course, you can export just about any of your documents into a PDF format so that any user on any platform can read them

Besides format compatibility, which allows you to exchange files with users on different platforms and office suites, iWork apps on the iPad have another powerful advantage, which is templates. When you launch Numbers, Pages or Keynote, these applications provide you with over a dozen templates that can be customized to your needs. And yes, these templates are truly usable and can be used for creating documents quickly.

Alternatives

Besides Microsoft's Office for the iPad, which is rumored to be released sometime during Spring of 2011, there are some real-life alternatives for iWork. Not one of them can beat Apple's offerings when it comes to features and ease of use, but in most cases, they come at a better price. In the end, maybe you just do not need all of these features. So, here are some cheaper solutions for your iPad's office needs:

Quickoffice Pro HD

This is a highly functional office suite for the iPad. Although its word processor is missing some features available in iWork, it is still quite usable. And it shines when it comes to saving your files to all kinds of cloud services. Currently, it supports MobileMe, Dropbox, Google Docs, Box, Huddle, SugarSync, Evernote, and Catch. Moreover, Quickoffice Pro HD can share your docs on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Yammer. You get all of that for half the price of iWork ($14.99).

Documents To Go

This is a cross-platform mobile office that is available, not only on the  iPad, but also on a whole range of mobile devices. Some users find it visually unappealing, but it is quite functional. Besides its rich editing capabilities, Documents To Go can import and synchronize files from cloud services like Box.net, Dropbox, Google Docs, iDisk, and SugarSync. It has no printing support as of now.

Office² HD

This is an office suite with a quite clumsy interface that, nevertheless, offers decent editing capabilities while preserving the MS Office formatting. It works quite well with cloud services; it supports Box, Dropbox, Google Docs, MobileMe, MyDisk, and generic WebDAV accounts. It is just $8 for an all-function set.

So, now you are ready to get to real office work done with an iPad using the office suite of your choice. And one more hint for you from experienced iPad users: when working with office apps for the iPad, it makes a lot of sense to use an external keyboard to make your work even more productive.