Software 1 - Essential productivity

Now, although I purchased the iPad myself and not through work, my initial interest was in the iPad as a work tool rather than a social one. Essentially  I was looking for something that might replace a laptop, or more specifically in my case, a tablet PC. So while the iPad comes with some essential work tools built in (mail, calendar, contacts, web browser) you will have to buy apps for many of the other work tasks you might want to accomplish. I think almost everyone in third level uses a word processing programme, a presentation programme (unfortunately), and some sort of spreadsheet application so these were the type of apps I initially went looking for. You have plenty of options, but I chose to buy the iPad versions of Apple's iWork productivity suite. The apps are Pages (word processing), Keynote (presentation) and Numbers (spreadsheet).

Not being a Mac user I was unfamiliar with Apples competitors to the all pervasive Microsoft Office. One look and you realise it is no competition at all. Mac wins hands down. I had recently replaced my work PC and if I had known then what I know now I would have switched to Mac. This is all the more remarkable considering I have been vehemently anti Mac for such a long time.

The rest of this post will concentrate on evaluating Keynote, as it is the app I use most for work. If you are used to Powerpoint you will be amazed by Keynote. It is incredible easy to use, and the controls are laid out in a very intuitive fashion. Best of all, you can import your existing PowerPoint presentations and they will work perfectly well on the iPad - at least mine do. Most of my lecture PowerPoints are straightforward without animations or transitions or multimedia and perhaps this is why they work so well. Getting the ppt / pptx files onto the iPad is simple. In iTunes select the iPad, then the apps tab and scroll down. At the bottom of the page under the 'File Sharing' heading select Keynote and then in the pane on the right select Add. Navigate to where your ppt / pptx file(s) is and select. Once you have selected all the files you want sync with the iPad.

Now open Keynote on the iPad. On the My Presentations screen select the upload button (at bottom, second from left). Then choose Copy from iTunes and select the presentation you want to open. The file converts and is now available in Keynote on the iPad. Repeat for the remaining presentations. You only have to do this once - the presentations will be present in the My Presentations screen the next time you open Keynote. In the next post I'll look further at the Keynote app.