Office Suites for iPad: The Roundup - PCWorld

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Since the day the iPad launched, zealous mobilophiles have wondered whether it might signal a new dawn in mobile computing--namely, one in which we all use a tablet in lieu of a desktop or laptop PC. With the abundance of native iPad productivity apps in the App Store, the iPad has held a clear lead in the race to tablet-centricity. But the real measure of the platform's productivity power is not the number of apps in the App Store but the quality of its best productivity apps. So I downloaded six of the most noteworthy iPad office apps and spent a week using them for all my daily work.

Because you can't ignore Apple's iWork apps as a force to be reckoned with on the iPad, I made Pages, Numbers, and Keynote my first priority in testing. These three apps bear the distinction of selling separately, which represents a departure from the selection criteria I've been using for roundups. The other three products I tried--Office2 HD, Documents To Go, and Quickoffice--are all-in-one suites that include word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation tools (among other features) within a single app. Since it would have been a glaring omission had I not included Apple's offerings, I've modified the qualifications here in the interest of diligence.

As I did in my roundup of Android productivity apps, I tested each of these leading suites for three important qualities: interface and usability, compatibility with Microsoft Office, and support for cloud services. I also took into account additional features, such as PDF viewing and support for other formats, and I considered price in the final evaluation. For each app, I created documents from scratch, imported rich documents with images and complex formatting from Microsoft Word, and exported edited documents back to Word to check for fidelity. The winner of this roundup is the app (or set of apps) with the best overall performance across all of those considerations.

In the course of testing, two general facts emerged that are well worth noting. First, an external keyboard is an essential accessory if you plan on doing a significant amount of document editing on the iPad. It doesn't really matter which keyboard you use. I've spent a fair amount of time on both the Apple Wireless Keyboard and the iPad Keyboard Dock, and both are excellent. Less-expensive third-party keyboards mostly work well, too.

Second, Dropbox is a phenomenally valuable app for anyone who uses the iPad for frequent document editing, as it acts as a file manager on the device and includes integrated links to all of the apps in this roundup. This means that you can use Dropbox to browse for a document in your synced folders and then launch it in Pages, Documents To Go, Quickoffice, Office2 HD, or just about any other compatible app.

Byte Squared Office2 HD

Office2 HD crams all of its navigation into one long, narrow menu, but it offers a good blend of cloud connectivity and basic editing features.Within the realm of all-in-one office apps for the iPad, Office2 HD has been a leader from the beginning. It's not nearly as robust or intuitive as Apple's iWork apps, but it packs far better cloud support.

Office2 HD creates and edits Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, and treats Microsoft Office formats as native. You can set the app to use .docx or the older .doc format as its default. It also views iWork documents and PDFs.

Office2 HD's Microsoft Office compatibility is generally very good. Partly because the app itself lacks many of the editing capabilities of its Office counterparts, you'll find it fairly tough to create a document in this app that Word, Excel, or PowerPoint won't preserve pretty much perfectly. And in my tests of importing complex documents containing special formatting, tables, and charts from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the app did a good job of displaying formatting options that it couldn't create on its own.

Interface design is Office2 HD's great weakness. All of the app's navigation happens in a single-column drop-down menu, and the way to reach all of the app's features is not immediately obvious. Once you get the hang of it, you can find your way around, but everything seems to take three or four more taps than it should. Meanwhile, the menu ribbon at the top of the screen scrolls sideways to reveal additional formatting options that you may not immediately realize exist. A novice user could be forgiven for thinking that the app doesn't support image embedding (it does, on the second page of the menu). My sense is that Byte Squared is trying to be clever by packing all of the nav controls into two narrow menus, but the execution falls flat.

When it comes to cloud support, however, Office2 HD comes nicely equipped. The app supports Box, Dropbox, Google Docs, MobileMe, MyDisk, and generic WebDAV accounts.

At $8, Office2 HD is certainly the cheapest office app in this roundup, and it offers some of the best cloud support I found. Its fidelity to Microsoft Office formats is admirable, but the app's interface leaves a lot to be desired. Still, it provides more formatting options than its non-Apple competitors do.

DataViz Documents To Go Premium

Continuing its long tradition of mobile document editing, DataViz has brought Documents To Go to the iPad. The app has come a long way from humble beginnings, and it sports some of the most compelling connectivity and sharing features of the bunch.

Documents To Go Premium is supposed to be able to edit presentations, but instead it forces you to do that work in some other, more capable app.At $17, Documents To Go Premium makes no bones about its purpose: This app is designed as an interim editing tool for those times when you can't get to your full-blown desktop or laptop. Its formatting options are pretty basic, but highly competent in preserving the integrity of whatever Word or Excel document you're working in.

Unfortunately, despite DataViz's claims to the contrary on the App Store listing, even this Premium version of Documents To Go doesn't actually edit PowerPoint files. Amusingly, if you create a new PowerPoint document within the app, you can add and rearrange slides on it, but you can't put in any text or pictures. If you tap the little triangle button in the bottom menu, however, the app will give you the option to open (and edit) your presentation in any other Office-compatible app that you have loaded. At first I thought I must have been doing something wrong, but the reviews on the Apple App Store are rife with criticism over this problem. It's almost certainly a bug, and I hope to see it rectified quickly. Otherwise I have to suggest that anyone looking for a way to edit presentations on the iPad should look elsewhere for that functionality (particularly given that even Documents To Go Premium looks elsewhere on your iPad for that functionality).

Where Documents To Go Premium stands out in a good way is in its cloud and sharing features. In addition to support for Box, Dropbox, Google Docs, iDisk, and SugarSync, it includes support for DataViz's Documents To Go Desktop App, which lets you sync files easily between the app and your desktop over a Wi-Fi connection.

Frankly, I had expected Documents To Go Premium to offer a far more compelling blend of features and performance than what it's delivering on the iPad right now. DataViz has had a decade's head start over its competitors in the mobile arena, but between the app's apparent bugs and its outright lack of common editing features, Documents To Go Premium is a big disappointment. There's simply nothing "premium" about it.

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Robert Strohmeyer is a veteran journalist and entrepreneur covering tech since the boom of the mid-90s. He's worked in the field as both a consultant and in-house IT pro. When he's not writing about technology, he can be found exploring the wine world at VineCult. Follow Robert on Twitter.

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The iPad office suite

by Galen Gruman, InfoWorld

Editor's Note: This article is reprinted from InfoWorld. For more IT news, subscribe to the InfoWorld Daily newsletter.

Users and business managers alike are increasingly looking at the iPad as a potential laptop replacement. More and more companies are providing employees iPads or letting employees use their own. So, just as companies typically install a suite of desktop productivity apps (nearly always Microsoft Office) on their laptops, what should the iPad equivalent be?

The answer can't be Office, because Microsoft has no iPad-compatible suite. But there are still several office suite candidates for the iPad, including Apple's iWork suite—Pages (), Numbers (), and Keynote ()—plus Quickoffice's Quickoffice Mobile Connect Suite () and DavaViz's Documents to Go Premium (). Quickoffice has a word processor and spreadsheet editor; DocsToGo (as it's labeled on the iPad) has a word processor, a spreadsheet editor, and a tool to edit text and add notes to a presentation. All the programs read and write to the Microsoft Office file formats.

After some investigation, I was surprised to find that none of these suites is ideal (though one comes close). But I stil came up with a list of apps that I think should be the standard installation on corporate iPads—the best individual productivity apps and one recommended suite.

Choosing the word processor was the toughest call. Note that none of the options support revision tracking; if that's essential to your workflow, you're out of luck.

Pages. To my mind, Apple's Pages is by far the most capable word processor for the iPad, with real layout controls such as the ability to designate page margins, set tabs, and add footers, headers, and images. It also has the most extensive text-formatting capabilities available, such as fonts, text size, lists, text color, line spacing, and paragraph alignment. It even spell-checks your document, highlighting potentially misspelled words; you can then have it suggest corrections by selecting the word and tapping Dictionary from the contextual menu. The search-and-replace feature even lets you constrain your actions to whole words or text with matching case, as you'd expect on the desktop.

You can create rich, stunning documents on the iPad with Pages—not with all the bells and whistles available from Microsoft Word () on the Mac, of course, but more than in any other mobile word processor. It's also easy to use.

But Pages has two major flaws that could kill it as an option for many companies and a third you should know about so you can avoid it. The first flaw is that it doesn't retain style sheets in the documents it saves. That will cause major issues if the document goes through any subsequent publishing workflow (such as for eventual HTML conversion or use in Adobe InDesign ()). The styles' text formatting is retained, but as local formatting only. Pages does have a styles capability that applies predefined formatting to text, but it does not apply a style sheet that is editable by Pages or Word; the Pages "styles" are just local formatting groups.

The second flaw is not so fatal: Pages doesn't work with cloud-storage services such as Google Docs, Dropbox, and Box.net. If you want to share files with others, your options are limited to e-mail, syncing to your computer via iTunes and sharing from there, or Apple's MobileMe service.

The third flaw is more of a foible: Any changes you make to a document are saved immediately in the original. You can't save the changed file later and retain the original file as is. The work-around is to make a duplicate of the file within Pages before you open it.

Quickoffice. Quickoffice's word processor is simple, with straightforward controls for basic formatting, such as font, text size, paragraph alignment, and lists. There are no layout controls, so you can use Quickoffice only to work on text. But Quickoffice retains the style sheets in your imported documents, so they're intact when you later export a document, even though it doesn't let you create, edit, or apply styles.

Quickoffice can connect to Box.net, Dropbox, Google Docs, and MobileMe cloud storage, as well as to a computer directly over Wi-Fi. It also of course can e-mail documents, and it provides a Save As option, as well as an internal folder structure so that you can organize your documents. But Quickoffice has no search-and-replace or even search-only capability, nor a word counter.

Documents To Go. DataViz's app is similar to Quickoffice in terms of its capabilities—they're essentially simple text editors with some basic formatting options. However, DocsToGo does offer search and replace, as well as word counting. But have to ding DocsToGo for one really dumb UI choice: All the controls are at the bottom of the screen, where they become hidden by the on-screen keyboard. This means you have to hide the keyboard each and every time you want to adjust any formatting—a real productivity killer. (Pages and Quickoffice put the controls at the top of the screen.)

My verdict: It's a split decision. Pages is all around the better word processor, but its flaws make it unusable for many organizations. If your document workflow rests on style sheets or requires cloud storage services such as Google Docs, your best bet is Quickoffice.

The spreadsheet candidates are much closer in capability than the word processors.

Numbers. Similar to Pages in its richness of functionality, Numbers is a full-on spreadsheet editor. You can enter complex formulas, create charts, and have multiple worksheets. The on-screen keyboard adapts to what you are entering, making special symbols and formulas very accessible. What takes a little getting used to is switching your entry mode for a cell, such as to text or to formula or to date, but that's how Numbers knows what controls to put in the on-screen keyboard.

Numbers, like its Mac counterpart (), takes an odd approach to spreadsheet creation if you're accustomed to working in Excel: Adding a worksheet results in a blank page with no cells. Excel users will be mystified as to what to do next. What they need to do is add a table to the worksheet—that's the grid of cells. In Numbers, a worksheet can have multiple tables, whereas Excel has just the one table automatically created. Once you know this, Numbers is easy to use.

Like Pages, Numbers has no Save As feature; you need to duplicate a document before opening to leave the original intact.

Quickoffice. Excel users will take to Quickoffice quickly, as it works very similarly. Quickoffice has a large set of functions available, and it's easy to work with cells, rows, and columns. The on-screen keyboard doesn't have the sophisticated contextual display that Numbers does, but Quickoffice's interface is nicely designed, so it works well without that ability.

Quickoffice has a Save As functionality, unlike Numbers. What it doesn't have is a set of charting tools, or the ability to sort columns or rows, both of which Numbers can do. Quickoffice also can't hide columns or rows—but neither can Numbers.

DocsToGo. The spreadsheet capabilities in DocsToGo are similar to those in Quickoffice, but again its user interface is deficient. Switching among worksheets is more work than necessary, for example. But it can hide rows, sort columns, and freeze panes, none of which Quickoffice can do.

The fact that the formatting controls are on the bottom of the screen isn't as problematic as it is for text documents, since you use the keyboard less. Still, it remains a pain.

My verdict: Numbers is the most capable of the spreadsheet editors, and its quirks are ones you can adjust to pretty quickly. It's my choice for iPad spreadsheet app.

I think that Keynote, Apple's presentation app for the iPad, is simply amazing. You can create beautiful presentations with sophisticated transitions and animation effects, as well as draw on capable text and object formatting tools. There's also a presenter notes feature, and you can add graphics from the Photos app, as well as create charts, tables, and shapes. Chances are you won't miss PowerPoint if you're using Keynote. My only frustration with it (besides the lack of Save As that all iWork apps share) is that it displays only in landscape orientation—a real puzzler, given Apple's other iWork and native iPad apps are orientation-adjusting.

Quickoffice. The Quickoffice suite cannot view, edit, or create presentations.

DocsToGo. The DocsToGo suite lets you open PowerPoint presentations and add notes to them, such as to make comments or provide feedback to your spreadsheet jockey. It also has basic editing capabilities. You can edit the text in your slides, though to do so you must switch to outline mode. Furthermore, you can do no formatting. You can also create blank slides and duplicate or delete existing ones. Note that if you're in outline mode, you have to go back to slide preview mode to insert a new slide. You can't delete or duplicate slides when in outline view.

The result is that DocsToGo is fine for touchup work on existing presentations or to create a basic text-only presentation that you might use as the starting point for a slideshow you add images and formatting to on the desktop—but that's all.

My verdict: The only real choice is Keynote. It's easily the strongest of the three iWork apps, able to replace PowerPoint completely for many users.

There are dozens of apps to open PDF documents on the iPad, but the built-in Preview app does that for mail attachments, and most Wi-Fi file-sharing apps preview PDF documents. What you really want is a program that can mark up PDF files, adding sticky notes and the like.

That app is GoodReader (). You can do most of the markup you would in Adobe Reader, such as notes, highlights, and even free-form shapes (for example, to circle an item). Once you get the hang of using your finger like a mouse for such actions, it's an easy-to-handle app.

GoodReader is not just a PDF markup app. You can also use it to view Office files, text files, and pictures, as well as play audio files. In addition, it comes with a Wi-Fi file-sharing capability to transfer documents to your computer.

The iPad can't open .Zip files natively—an amazing omission. There are several apps that can unzip files, but the best is ZipThat. Its clean interface makes it easy to use.

Although the iPhone comes with a calculator app, the iPad doesn't. There are several calculator apps for the iPad, but I prefer the simple, capable Calculator Pro+. If you do lots of calculations and want a tape function to capture all calculations (and to e-mail that history as a file), then get the less aesthetically pleasing Calculator HD.

If you need to view Photoshop-native files—for page layout, Web, or presentation projects—get the AirFilesHD app, which also offers Wi-Fi file sharing and basic drawing capabilities.

The iPad's own Notes app is fine for taking notes, and its Calendar app is perfectly suitable to manage your appointments. There are tons of alternatives for both, but I don't see the point—with two exceptions: The Notes Plus app ($4) lets you take handwritten notes with a stylus (such as Ten One Design's Pogo Stylus), then export them to PDF, though it doesn't convert the handwriting to text. You can also type in text and include audio recordings. If your notes include drawings, Notes Plus is the way to go. The Notability app is for people who take notes while recording lectures, presentations, and the like. Afterward, if you tap any text you entered, Notability will play back the audio recording from that point in time, so you can hear what was being said as you were typing.

Given that no one suite does it all well enough, what is the ideal combination? That's a tough decision, but I think the best overall productivity suite is Pages, Numbers, Keynote, GoodReader, and ZipThat. If Pages' lack of style-sheet retention is a deal-breaker, you could go with Quickoffice, Keynote, GoodReader, Calculator Pro, and ZipThat. (You might make Numbers available as well for those who need to create charts and do more sophisticated spreadsheet work than Quickoffice can accomplish.) Either way, toss in AirFilesHD if you need to view Photoshop files and either Notes Plus or Notability if you need more sophisticated note-taking capabilities.

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