iPad: The Missing Manual, 4th Edition

Chapter 11. Get Productive with iWork

You’ll learn to:

• Create iWork documents

• Import and export Microsoft Office files

• Export files as PDFs

• Share iWork files

• Find iWork alternatives

WORD PROCESSING, SPREADSHEETS, AND presentations probably aren’t the first things that come to mind when you think of the iPad—unless they’re the first things that come to your mind on any topic. After you’ve used the iPad for longer than two hours, you realize that it’s a great little device for consuming stuff (videos, eBooks, web pages), but not so much for creating stuff, like, well, word-processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Apple’s iWork suite for the iPad attempts to change that perception. For many years, iWork—consisting of the programs Pages (word processing), Numbers (spreadsheet), and Keynote (presentations)—lived on some Macs in the giant, looming shadow of Microsoft Office. After all, from corporate offices to college campuses, Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are the de facto standards for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. But iWork plays nice with Office formats, and thanks to iCloud, you can get to those files from anywhere on the Web.

If you’re considering buying iWork, this chapter is for you. iWork isn’t a do-all, be-all desktop suite, but neither does it take up gigabytes of hard drive space. It can, however, keep you productive—even if you’d rather use your ...