Is The Best iPad Office App Open Office For iPad?

What office apps are available for the iPad

Looking for the best iPad productivity apps. Of course, of the first set of applications which might grouped together, be an office suite are the Apple made apps of Pages, Numbers and Keynote which are the iWork apps and because they’re designed by the company that invented the iPad they have to be number one in the list. What about openoffice for iPad? But you do also have Office2 HD, Documents To Go and Quick Office, iPad Openoffice that are all in one suites of office applications and within you have the usual suspects included, with the processing of words, the processing of numbers with spreadsheets and of course making presentations that you’re going to show within a business environment. All of those within one single single application purchase and you have them for iPad business use.

It seems quite obvious that you should include iWork apps as a grouping because of the way that the iPad works and you say only one application on the screen at a time so it doesn’t really matter if you have two pay for them separately whereas with the other three offerings you can buy buy them in one single purchase.

Byte Squared has Office2 HD available for the iPad

As you would expect with office2 HD you’re able to create and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files and the Microsoft Office file formats are the default or native for the app and you may also use the new .docx or the older format of .doc as the default. Office2 will also open documents that you have created using iWork as well as letting you view PDFs. One of things that you will look out for with an iPad application that is for editing office documents will be the compatibility with the desktop applications.

For the most part, these mobile applications create documents that will arrive in the desktop application without any major changes being forced upon them by the formatting that has been applied during the creation of the document. Also when you bring in documents from the desktop application you want to be able to import documents that our complex, that might have complicated formatting, tables or charts and be able to render them just as if you are looking at them on the desktop application.

To a certain extent interface design is taken care of by the human interface design requirements of using Xcode by the developer and where things become different is in the application of ideas that are used to implement those features. You want the application behaving so that it becomes a useful app rather than an application where you feel lost and don’t know how to do things. Finding an application that is intuitive is extremely important when it is time to get some work done.

Office2 with its interface design has the application navigation in a single column menu that drops down and it’s not immediately clear that this is the way to reach the features of the application. It does take a little time to get used to how to find your way to all of the options and sometimes you might feel that there is more tapping on the screen to be done, than is really necessary.

So within Office2 HD you’ll have pretty much all of the functions and facilities that you need to work on office application files and you also have cloud support so that you can get applications files from Box.net, Google Docs, Dropbox and other web cloud accounts. Certainly Office2 HD is one office application for the iPad that it is worth looking at. Some users may even say it is one of the best apps for iPad. There is quite a large amount of choice when searching for the best iPad apps.

Documents To Go Premium

To have all of the capabilities for working with office documents on iPad you need to buy the premium version to have access to files that are for presentations and also you need premium to have full cloud support. Cloud access makes it so that you can get to your documents on the iPad with services like Dropbox and Sugarsync. Documents To Go does have its own desktop application for Windows and also for the Mac which allows you to synchronise files between the iPad application and your desktop and it does this via a Wi-Fi data connection.

DataViz, the developer of Documents To Go have been creating mobile apps for some time but some editing features are missing, that definitely should really be there. The lack of some features within this iPad office application will lead many to think about using other applications rather than Documents To Go.

Quick Office Pro HD

Quick Office Pro HD has a large number of services included for the for cloud connection, it works with box.net, dropbox, Huddle, Google Docs, and SugarSync and is easy to connect to each of the services or whichever WebDav services you use. Despite Quick Office Pro HD for iPad having good cloud support facilities the usage of the application leaves a lot to be desired. Quite likely it will get better over time, the same with all of these applications because the updates tend to come fairly frequently as the developers improve they offering, Quick Office Pro HD will probably be a decent iPad productivity app in time.

For the moment you would be better off to wait and try out other iPad office applications before you lay out the cash to buy this office application. There are better ones out there, that if you buy and try, you will probably stick with.

Pages, Numbers And Keynote By Apple

These iWork applications came out at the same time as the Apple iPad was launched and the company from Cupertino have updated these softwares regularly since they were introduced. Because they are Apple applications, these applications tend to be easy to use and intuitive. The simplicity of the design and use of the menus are presented in the way that makes it easy to let you do whatever you want to do with the application.

I find it very useful, the fact that you can buy these applications separately because I use Numbers and Keynote more often than I would use Pages. Great to be able to buy just the applications that I required. Instead of using Pages I am using SimpleNote in combination with Scrivener for Mac to do the word processing that I need to do, to write my web posts and my articles.

There is a possibility though that as soon as iCloud becomes available I may start to use Apple Pages application for my writing. The text that I work on will be pushed to all my other Apple devices as I work on them rather than having to rely on any cloud services to be organise synchronisation.

The Apple applications of course have their own extensions and file types in their own right but of course you can bring in office .doc, .XLS and the ppt file format from PowerPoint, but if you want to send work out then you will make a separate copy of your work, in as much as you will save first in the Apple format and then export to the Microsoft Office compatible file.

Seeing as I don’t have to work very often with office compatible files, with having to send those types of files to and fro between myself and other people, I don’t have any difficulty in using the Apple formats. In any case I prefer to keep things simple by using text in its most simple form in text files created in a text editor and leave the formatting to be done on the desktop computer. Are there any advantages to using a full office Suite rather than individual apps on the iPad

For most uses there are hardly any advantages to using an office suite of iPad applications rather than using the apps individually on your iPad. Unless you need to embed a spreadsheet or a table within a Word document or to be able to grab something from a presentation to put into a word processing document then I’m not sure that it is any easier by having all of the major types of application grouped into one single suite.

How do you move office files on to the iPad so they can be edited

When you are moving files on iPad in between Numbers and Excel or between Keynote and PowerPoint you will see some difference in the results of formatting, depending on where you open the application file. Despite these difficulties I think that using the Apple applications are going to work well enough for mobile computing warriors that need to create and edit documents on the go.

The other thing with the Apple applications for office on iPad is that moving files and at the moment, not quite as simple as with other applications that give you Dropbox box.net and Google Docs as cloud services. This will change once iCloud becomes available and we won’t need to even think about synchronisation, as all of our documents will automatically be saved and then pushed to iCloud, then onwards to our other Apple computing devices that we are using. We will have our files with us all of the time, wherever we are. You won’t get that in Open Office iPad.

Moving files to iPad or copying files to the iPad is actually quite simple especially if you use Dropbox which is one of the de facto ways to move files. Right now Apple would have you move files using iTunes or by email, but they say that is this is not totally the best way to do it. For that reason they are bringing out iCloud in the autumn of 2011 which will answer all of the questions and gripes of those people that are worried about how to move files to the iPad. Is there a better way to consider for working with text on the iPad and indeed with all Apple computer devices

For working with text for me there is a better way and that is to use the iPad for creation of pure text without formatting and then to have that text go to Scrivener on the Mac or it could go to Scrivener on Windows even. You are then able to manipulate and output into the file format as required which could be a Microsoft Office type of document or it could be a specific type of file such as Final Draft for playwrights or the document could just go out as straight text as required by your editor. What are the cost considerations of the various applications.

Cost of the iPad Productivity Apps

Quick office connect is €15.99 and Office2 HD is €5.99. While to buy apps like Pages and Numbers, you buy them separately for the price of €7.99 per application. You can also add to Keynote by buying the Keynote Remote application which can be used with an iPhone to control the presentation as you use it connected to a projector. iPad 2 office apps will keep getting better as the developers update them.

What else do you need to be a road warrior with an iPad?

So what else do you need to get on the iPad to be able to use it to best advantage while you’re out on the road working and creating office type documents? Do you really need iPad office apps? Well if you have a keyboard to go with the iPad that would be a great advantage. There are keyboards available as part of iPad cases that are particularly useful as they obviously protect your iPad and also include a keyboard to allow you create text and get your ideas out of your head into text format for consumption by your followers. Another useful thing to have would be a Dropbox account, in fact I believe a Dropbox account to be essential if you are an iPad user. This is needed for having access to your documents while you are on the move. iCloud will take over some of that functionality when it arrives in the autumn of 2011.

As a user of Scrivener on the Mac for all of my writing I would have to say that Scrivener is also an essential requirement for a writer, due to all of the things that you can with organising your writing. Whether you are a novel writer or an article writer and using Scrivener it would be good to also have a text editor for work on the iPad such as SimpleNote or NebulousNotes.

One more tool for use with the iPad which I believe to be essential is Dragon Dictation. This is a speech to text application that you can use as I do to create articles and documents very quickly. This document has been produced by talking into DragonDictation and into a microphone connected to my iPad. It is amazing how fast you can make get the words on the page with Dragon Dictation. Nice to know that the application is also free. It has to be one of the best apps for iPad. What would your best app for iPad be? Could you make a list of iPad best apps and would Openoffice iPad be on that list?