iPad 2: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Chapter 10. Get Productive with iWork

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 impression. For many years, iWork—consisting of the Pages (word-processing), Numbers (spreadsheet), and Keynote (presentations) programs—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 (or you already have it and don’t know where to start with it), 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 for files and features you’ll never use. It can, however, keep you productive—even if you’d rather use your iPad to watch The Office instead of ...