iCloud, documents editing on iPad and windows pc confusion

[Colin95]

Hi, forgive me if this has been asked before, I have searched the complete forum but cannot find a relevant answer.
My partner does all her work on her PC, we have just purchased an iPad so that she can do her work on the fly as it were. iCloud is turned on in the iPad settings, we have downloaded pages for iPad and documents are uploaded to
the cloud as they should. My problem is the ease of use for her. What we want to do is, use an existing document
created in word, save to the cloud, open and edit on the iPad, get home open it up in word, edit it, and save it back
to the cloud. The way it seems to work is once the document is in the cloud, windows uses iCloud control panel to
download the file, we then tell iCloud to open it in word, great so far. We then make any adjustments/edits.
Here is when the problem starts, we ideally would like then to save the edited document directly to the cloud, but the only options are to save on the local pc. We then have to upload this file to the cloud which means that we now have 2 versions of the same document, 1 the original and the other the latest edited version. Is there a way to save
directly to the cloud overwriting the original downloaded file? Ideally we would like it to work like Dropbox, which has its own folder on the pc you then go into this folder on any pc by logging to our account, make adjustments save to
the Dropbox folder and it over writes the original.
Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.
Colin95

 

[ogilley]

The best way to accomplish what you want is with the free app Dropbox.

Sent from my iPad using iPF

 

[Jyc23]

Hi, forgive me if this has been asked before, I have searched the complete forum but cannot find a relevant answer.
My partner does all her work on her PC, we have just purchased an iPad so that she can do her work on the fly as it were. iCloud is turned on in the iPad settings, we have downloaded pages for iPad and documents are uploaded to
the cloud as they should. My problem is the ease of use for her. What we want to do is, use an existing document
created in word, save to the cloud, open and edit on the iPad, get home open it up in word, edit it, and save it back
to the cloud. The way it seems to work is once the document is in the cloud, windows uses iCloud control panel to
download the file, we then tell iCloud to open it in word, great so far. We then make any adjustments/edits.
Here is when the problem starts, we ideally would like then to save the edited document directly to the cloud, but the only options are to save on the local pc. We then have to upload this file to the cloud which means that we now have 2 versions of the same document, 1 the original and the other the latest edited version. Is there a way to save
directly to the cloud overwriting the original downloaded file? Ideally we would like it to work like Dropbox, which has its own folder on the pc you then go into this folder on any pc by logging to our account, make adjustments save to
the Dropbox folder and it over writes the original.
Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.
Colin95

If I understand you correctly, the answer is "no". As far as being able to do it with Dropbox, it would really depend on whether the app on your iPad has the ability to sync folders on Dropbox. The Pages app doesn't have this capability. You might look into Quick Office, though I don't know if it does either.

Unfortunately, this is one of the weak points of iOS. For a variety of reasons, iOS doesn't let apps access the files of other apps, except by making copies of the files. So, the only way (as far as I know) that you would be able to sync changes to Dropbox would be via an app that has sync-to-Dropbox capability built in. Note that just because an app allows you to access Dropbox through it doesn't mean that it can sync to Dropbox. Apps that access Dropbox but don't sync actually download and make a copy of the downloaded file which is pretty much independent of the file on Dropbox. So, uploading the file after editing would result in a new file, which you could manually "sync" by deleting the old file and renaming the newly uploaded one.