Hi Rwsjreynolds! I’m in the same boat you are. I’ve been gradually coming back to Apple after being away for a long, long time (Apple IIe, original MAC). I started with the MacPro when Apple decided to use the Intel processor. I have my MacPro partitoned for both MAC and PC. I use the MAC side for iTunes and all photos and video things. They just do it better. I added the iphone leaving behind a strong alliance to the Palm products and now I have the iPad. I like you am trying to figure out its place in my life but in order to be truly useful to me it’s got to do some things I need in the PC world.
So here’s my early read on it. Outlook is handled very well with the Microsoft Exchange. It was serving well on the iphone but on the iPad the screen size makes it very doable for most email activities. I figure my usage will be split as follows: iphone 30%, iPad 50% and PC 20% (there’s just some things I need the laptop for because I’m an engineer and some attachments are CAD files). So email, contacts and calendar are basically the same on iPad vs. PC. I found an app called iMExchange that allows fairly seamless wireless syncing of the Task and Notes in your Outlook.
As far as the Office products, I believe you’re going to find it less seamless. I have bought and tried all the big Office apps for the iPad. QuickofficeHD, Documents to Go Premium, Office2 HD and Pages. Some have things that they do better than the others but there is not one program that works in my mind seamless with MS Office. Let’s start with Excel. I don’t believe spreadsheets will ever be the forte of touch screens. Creating and editing spreadsheets just don’t work due to the manipulation etc. Give me a keyboard and mouse any day. So I use Quickoffice (it reads MS 2007) to pull in the files and mainly just view them with minor data inputs. Same thing with the Powerpoint files. I basically either save them in PDF and transfer them to the iPad in its more compact format or in a pinch pull it up using either Quickoffice or Doc to go. Word processing is a different matter. Docs to go have more capabilities than Quickoffice but both are fairly limited in terms of functions. Heavily formatted documents do lose some of its functions in the transfer between PC and iPad. My problem is I just don’t like typing on the iPad with these programs. The app I like is Pages. It’s limited but I can create a better looking document with it than I can in MS Word (obviously due to my skill set in MS Office). I actually wish there was an iWorks version for the PC. It’s much more like the Microsoft Works that has more than enough functions for me. Eventually, I feel the ultimate solution is Google Docs and having everything in the cloud.
Note taking – This has been where my major concentration has been. One problem whatever I use has to sync with the PC side. I have been trying an app called Mobilenoter which syncs with OneNote on the PC. Now the iPad version is very limited in function but one thing it’s got going for it is that it syncs very well with my iPad, iPhone and PC. My goal has always been to be able to review my notes where ever I was or whenever I found I had the time. Having the notes on the iPhone has been great but trying to get the notes in hasn’t been fruitful. Even though the iphone4 allows Bluetooth keyboards to work I don’t see myself going back to the folding keyboard and Palm Pilot approach (too geeky). So if I can get decent note taking on the iPad then I think I found nirvana.
