Office on an iPad

[Frink]

Hi all,

I'm buying an iPad Air for my daughter who is about to start her year 10 GCSE coursework in Sept.

She needs to complete school assignments using Word, Excel & Powerpoint. Completed assignments will need to be taken to school on a memory stick.

2 questions if I may:

i) My understanding is that the only way to run Office software on the iPad is to install Office 365 (and pay an annual fee starting around £59). Is this correct - or are there cheaper ways of using software that is Office-compatible?

ii) Presuming I can create Office-compatible docs on the iPad, what's the best way to move them onto a stick for taking to school? I heard that iPad doesn't support external drives so easily...

Thanks for your support!

Frink.

 

[prflyer]

Hi Frink,

Question #1:

Word, Excel & Powerpoint for Ipad only let you open/view documents, to be able to create or edit documents you need a Office 365 subscription. There are many Office compatible apps for Ipad, I use WPS Office (free app) and my experience has been good with creating, opening and editing documents, also it can save and open documents to/from cloud drive services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and others.

Question #2:

If you save to a Cloud Drive then from any computer you can access them and transfer them to a stick.

You don't state if you have Office installed in your computer? If not WPS Office has a free version that runs on windows.

 

[Frink]

Thank you prflyer - I appreciate your reply.

I will check out WPS Office. It sounds ideal - we don't need to go 'full office bells & whistles', we just want to create essays, reports and simple presentations etc.
I do have office on my laptop so worst case we can make some fancy tweaks on there if needed.

I haven't used Cloud Drive before but I get the principle - in any case it looks like the way to move the data around quickly.

Thanks again,

Frink.

 

[jwt873]

Personally, I wouldn't recommend using an iPad as a replacement for a laptop or desktop computer when it comes to using a dedicated device to create documents in Word. The iPad wasn't really designed to replace the computer.

The screen is too small for me. You can add a Bluetooth keyboard, but there are no provisions to use a mouse unless you jailbreak the iPad. I find that the lack of a mouse to make menu selections, text selection and do other things like creating tables and inserting images etc. makes creating documents much more difficult.

 

[col.bris]

We appreciate your comment however that is your personal opinion. iPads are in schools across the world and function fine for what the op needs. Using a mouse is going back in time. No the iPad is not for every one however millions are more than satisfied using it as a replacement for a PC. In saying that if you are a heavy user of spreadsheets etc then the iPad just makes it 10 times easier when mobile to open those documents on the fly . On a personal side I use my iPad for every thing including moderating 3 forums producing documents for clients such as quotes , invoices , reports. Also research via the web, reading and much much more Not to mention Using Apple TV as a presentation tool with my clients I could go on but I think you get my drift.

 

[Gtatler]

Col.bris But then you were a specialist Apple reseller for quite a few tears ! But I Agree. iPad is useful for many things. I could add to your list keeping my personal and attorney accounts, and many others.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[s2mikey]

I've been pretty happy with the Apple office apps that are free! Pages and Numbers get the job done for me. I don't do anything particularly hardcore or anything but for most standard uses they are fine apps and do the job. Using the cloud is a great way to keep docs synced between devices.

I do have to say though that at some point creating very large or "heavy" documents would be better to do on a laptop with a full keyboard and input device. Tablets do a great job at their intended tasks and can be quite productive. But, sometimes I have to use my MacBook Pro for the big stuff.