Docs to go?
This is from another member
I did some research for my company before we issued iPads to the field teams recently. Like most companies our business uses MS Office primarily and I had to determine the best software for the iPad to be able to read and save Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files. For day-to-day use Pages, Numbers, Keynote and GoodReader were fine. However when it came to editing and saving documents in Word and especially Excel, Pages and Numbers weren't up to the task.
So I downloaded and tried some other office apps. Besides Apple’s iWork Suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) these were the highest rated:
- Office2 HD ($7.99)
- Documents to Go ($9.99)
- QuickOffice ($14.99)
I was able to open and manipulate several basic spreadsheets, Word documents, PDF’s, etc. without any issues in all three programs as well as Apple’s apps.
However when I began throwing some heavy duty spreadsheets at them there were issues. Depending on the size of the file, some programs opened them faster than others, but due to size it did take a little time for the largest files (about 6MB) to open. Some programs including Numbers and Documents to Go would not open the larger Excel files at all due to size. Others had trouble with formatting, sheet protection or unsupported formulas however they would open as “read only”.
Office2 HD was the only program that would allow me to open all of the files, make changes and save them. I was able to export them to my company computer, however upon import some non-destructive formatting changes were made and although the figures were fine, they lost some color coding, etc. The more basic files I opened and saved in Numbers, QuickOffice and Documents to go exported with the formatting intact.
Even though everything in the iPad is solid state/Flash memory which makes it very snappy, the somewhat low RAM causes a bottleneck when opening and saving such large files. (Since the iPad 2 has a little more horsepower it should do better in this area) but we need to keep in mind that the iPad isn’t a replacement for a computer or even a full-fledged laptop.
At this point all I can say is that all of the programs work well with Word and PowerPoint files as well as “average” Excel spreadsheets, but may not with larger, more complicated spreadsheets. One work around if you just need to share a complicated spreadsheet would be to create a PDF.
After using all of these apps for a while I still use GoodReader, Pages and Numbers for day-to-day work. For more detailed work I'd probably go with Documents To Go. The other two are fine but DTG has the most intuitive and elegant UI IMHO. If I had to deal with large spreadsheets it would be Office2 HD, but it's very kludgy compared to DTG. I don't think you'd go wrong with any of the three though.
Hope that helps!
I personally now have iworks, docs to go hd and office2. But you are right, money is tight but I've bought them all over a period of 6 months.
from Somerset UK on my iPad using IPF app