Question regarding text documents

[Nancyhilton]

Hi, I am new at the iPad and am looking to find a good text document. I own a PC at home and at my job. I am a teacher. I already have dropbox, and need to know the best document app that I can get that will allow me to edit what I have done either at home or at school on the PC and then dropbox it and they work on it on my iPad.
I will be presenting to a group of people soon on ways they can help their child or student with disabilites with the iPod and the iPad, so anything you can assist me would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,

Nancy

 

[Jeeper]

Hi Nancy, welcome! I find GoodReader has many "document handling" features, you may want to give it a look.

 

[Nancyhilton]

Jeeper,
will this program allow me to go into the word document and make changes on my ipad then dropbox it back so that I can pull it up on the PC at school and print it until I get a printer that will work for the ipad

 

[Jeeper]

You can certainly edit text, highlight, circle items, and add "sticky notes". It can save, send directly to other apps, e-mail,or a printer. I don't have a Dropbox acct. so I don't know exactly how that works, sorry.

(it handles photos too)

 

[chowdown]

You can certainly edit text

Edit text in a Word Document displayed in GoodReader? Edit any sort of text in GoodReader? How?

Hi Nancy

If you just want to edit text, I'd suggest copying it from your Word doc, pasting it into a great little app called PlainText (you get it on your PC and on your iPad. PC version is free.) which automatically syncs with DropBox. Edit that text on your iPad or any computer in the world, then when you're ready, paste into Word. I can explain this better later on, if no one else convinces you to go down a different road.

If you want to do more than just edit text, if you want to do fancy formatting stuff on the iPad and produce a doc that looks the same as it does on PC, well, good luck. I'll let one of the other daredevils on this forum take you through that.

As for resources to help the kids; what sort of disabilities are we talking about?

 

[Nancyhilton]

chowdown,
Thanks, I will check it out and see what I can find out from it. I work with kids with all sorts of disabilities but the main ones are the more severe. Our district bought ipods for every special education student in the high school. we use apps that are free to help them and get audio books that we can check out from the public library for the ipods as well. That way they don't have to read it, they can listen and hopefully follow along. We have also purchased an Intel Reader that we can take a picture of a worksheet of questions or short reading material and it will transfer over to audio so that they students can listen to it on the ipod without having to listen to me read it to them all the time.

 

[Tim SPRACKLEN]

chowdown,
Thanks, I will check it out and see what I can find out from it. I work with kids with all sorts of disabilities but the main ones are the more severe. Our district bought ipods for every special education student in the high school. we use apps that are free to help them and get audio books that we can check out from the public library for the ipods as well. That way they don't have to read it, they can listen and hopefully follow along. We have also purchased an Intel Reader that we can take a picture of a worksheet of questions or short reading material and it will transfer over to audio so that they students can listen to it on the ipod without having to listen to me read it to them all the time.

The Apple app 'Pages' is a stripped down version of their Mac iWorks MS Office suite. It can read '.doc' and '.docx' MS Word documents and you can edit them and then resave them in '.doc' format. I use Pages for exactly the application you have in mind; taking a Word document that I've authored on my PC and then making changes on my iPad. You can import documents into Pages either via email (as an extension - in iPad mail, if you touch and hold the extension it will offer you the option 'Open in Pages') or, if you subscribe to the Apple MobileMe service, then Pages can download documents from there too.

Pages handles Word documents pretty well, but complex formatting can leave it wanting a little. For example, it can display footnotes and endnotes, but you cannot edit them (at least, not without an ugly workaround - I'll leave it up to your imagination!) and similarly for subscripts and superscripts. Also the list of supported fonts is limited too. But tables, diagrams, photos etc all come out OK, multi-column formats are fine as are Word 'styles' and 'formatting'. Actually, I find that handling photos and diagrams in Pages is far easier than in MS Word; you can simply drag them around the screen, use 'pinch' to resize them and the multi-finger 'twist' to rotate them - when you even get given the exact angle you are rotating the diagram/photo to.

If you want to see what Pages and the other Office apps can do, Apple has a useful online help site

http://help.apple.com/iwork/1.3/mobile/interface/index.html#tan724868a9

Good luck

Tim
Scotland

 

[Nancyhilton]

I downloaded plaintext since it was free and at first I was liking it but then I couldn't find a menu button or how to get out except the home button. Any suggestions, maybe I did something wrong.

 

[Nancyhilton]

okay I finally figured that out, not sure if I like that program or not, I have to do to many changes when I put it back in Microsoft word, it is a great idea though. Any others that I can checkout that will allow me to do text documents like M. Word without too much work when I put it back on my PC