The on-the-go business app toolkit for the iPad
Of the tens of thousands of apps available for the iPad,
only a relative few are must-have tools for business use. Productivity apps
have seen major change lately, with updates to iWork, the introduction of Microsoft Office, the removal of Office2HD
as a generally available app, and Google's changes to Quickoffice.
Read on for our picks of the best native office editors,
best cloud office editors, and best native companion productivity tools for the
iPad. (And most also work on the iPhone, too!)
Best word processor: Apple Pages
Apple's iWork Pages is good at layout-oriented documents,
and it offers revisions tracking, tables, spell checking, search and replace,
text formatting, graphics insertion, commenting, password protection, AirPrint
printing, and both ePub and PDF export. It also permits multiuser editing via
the Web (but with no revisions tracking or file security).
It does have some limits: You can't work directly with
documents in cloud storage services, just those in Apple's iCloud. You must
copy a file before editing; there's no Save As feature once you begin editing.
You can't create or apply character styles, and you can't create paragraph
styles.
Runner-up word processor (tie): Microsoft Word
The new Word for iPad is equivalent in editing capabilities
to Apple Pages, missing password protection and comment insertion but
supporting hyperlink insertion and allowing you to choose the proofing
language.
The reason Word doesn't tie with Pages is because of its
inability to print, as well as its poor file-handling and file-sharing
capabilities -- you can't send document to other apps, or rename files or
manage file folders.
Best spreadsheet editor: Apple Numbers
Apple's iWork Numbers spreadsheet editor is great at data
entry, especially numeric, date, and formula info. The keyboard even adjusts
based on the type of data you're working with. Cell formatting is less flexible
than in Excel, and Excel users may dislike Numbers' approach to creating
worksheets: Numbers allows several on a page. But the newest version better
supports multisheet workbooks and adds CSV export, animated charts, and
(unsecured) group editing via the Web.
Also, like all iWork apps, the only cloud storage service
you can directly edit files in is Apple's own iCloud. But it does support AirPrint
and PDF export.
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