The keyboardless Office: a review of iWork for iPad

The validity of the iPad as a casual device—something you can use to check your e-mail, surf the Internet on the couch, or watch a movie in bed—has never really been in question.  The real question is, "Can I convince my boss to buy me one?" Unless your boss is Michael Scott, chances are he’s going to want to know if you can actually be productive with it. With its port of the iWork desktop suite, Apple is hoping that you can be, and that the iPad can be more than a toy.

“I’m an importer/exporter.” 

iWork for the iPad wouldn’t be of much use if you could create documents only to have them constrained to the device. Fortunately, Apple has included import and export functionality; unfortunately, that import and export functionality isn’t very good.  There are three import/export flavors to choose from, multiple formats, a cable, and an application that is already asked to do too much.

When it comes to importing and exporting, your best bet is e-mail. You can import Word and Pages documents into Pages, Excel and Numbers documents into Numbers, and Powerpoint and Keynote documents into Keynote from any e-mail you receive.  

Exporting through e-mail, on the other hand, isn’t as flexible. You can export a Pages document as a Pages document, a Word document, or a PDF; a Keynote presentation in the native format or a PDF (PPT format is inexplicably left out); and a Numbers document in Numbers format or as a PDF (no XLS exporting). While the choices would be excellent if all our colleagues used iWork on a Mac, the majority do not. So the suite's e-mail export functionality is lacking, which is sad, because it’s the best option. If you need to make a few quick changes to that Excel spreadsheet that your colleague sent to you and then send it back to her quickly, you'll have to send it back in Numbers format and hope she can do the conversion on her end.

The second option for importing and exporting is Apple’s iWork.com. To work on a document that's on iWork.com, you have to download it in Mobile Safari, prompting the device to open it within the application. This wasn’t immediately clear to me at first, as I thought that it was only possible to view a document stored in the iWork service on the iPad through Mobile Safari. It wasn’t until I read our complete iPad review that I realized you could download and edit the whole document. 

Exporting to iWork.com after you've made your changes is straightforward—you simply choose iWork.com from the export dialog from the main menu of any of the iPad applications. The export also lets you send e-mail notifications of what document is being shared, as well as a URL to the document. In a perfect world, you would just load an iWork share similar to a MobileMe drive, but the service is in beta, so there may yet be hope.  

One nice thing about iWork.com is that PC users can download documents from the service in a format that they can actually read and write, which means that it's less difficult to collaborate on documents with Microsoft Office users.

The third and final import/export option is what Apple calls "file sharing." You need a computer with iTunes installed, an iPad (of course), and perhaps most irritating, a USB-to-dock connector cable. The whole experience of tethering the iPad to the computer really brings back memories of connecting two machines via a null modem cable to play Warcraft in 1996.

To import a file, whether a PPT, Keynote, Excel, Numbers, Pages, or Word document, you must first plug your iPad into your computer, open iTunes, go to the "Apps" tab, scroll to the bottom, select the application you want to send a document to, and then choose the file from an open dialog box. Once you're done with that, you go back to the iPad, go to the "open a document" screen in any of the three apps, tap on the folder icon on the upper right-hand corner of the screen, and then select the document you want to import. It really is like magic(k)! I’m no marketing expert, but Apple may want to stay away from the phrase “There is no step 10!” in the advertising materials.

Exporting is done in much the same way, but in reverse: you select a menu option from within the app that lets you export via file sharing, then you connect the iPad to the computer, open iTunes, open the Apps tab, scroll to the bottom, find the document you want, and finally drag it into a folder on your computer. You can then open the document on your desktop or laptop computer.

The whole "file sharing" process is obviously just another step towards iTunes replacing the Finder. Why can’t I do this over Bluetooth or WiFi? Why doesn’t the iPad just mount on the desktop like a drive? In Apple’s attempt to make this as simple as possible for everyone, they have made it excruciating for those who know what they are doing, and inexplicably difficult for those who have no clue.

Importing and exporting across formats is basically what you would expect. Some formatting is wrong, errors crop up, but the majority of the content is there. There are, however, certain features that just aren’t supported in the iWork for iPad suite. During our testing, we ran into issues importing across applications, but also when importing from the desktop version of the software to the iPad version. Some of the errors we ran into stemmed from the iPad app's inability to group objects, and we also saw some table-related issues. If what you're doing is mission-critical, you must check formatting and errors before presenting an end product, and remind yourself this isn’t the same iWork suite you're accustomed to on the Mac.

Keynote on the iPad

Keynote is the crown jewel of the iWork for iPad suite, and the object-centric, drag-and-drop nature of creating and editing presentations lends itself very well to a tablet device. 

After selecting from among 12 templates for creating a new document, you're brought into Keynote’s main interface. This interface is broken up into three sections: the main staging area where content is added and slides are edited, a narrow sidebar called "the navigator" on the left-hand side of the screen that displays small thumbnails of each slide, and the toolbar where many of Keynote's more advanced formatting functionality lives. 

The main staging area can be zoomed in and out on with normal pinch-in and pinch-out gestures, and moved around with finger drags. When the main staging area takes up the entire screen, the toolbar and navigator auto-hide, but they can be brought back by simply touching where they should be on the screen. A slide can be zoomed out to 50 percent of normal size or blown up to 200 percent. Finished presentations are 1024x768, regardless of where you display them, whether on the iPad or a computer.

To add a slide, tap the small plus sign icon at the bottom of the navigator. This brings up a pop-up that prompts you to choose from one of six slide templates (including a blank slide). 

Slide order can be rearranged by tap-and-holding a slide, pulling it out towards the main staging area, and then placing it back in the navigator at its new desired position. Multiple slides can be moved at once by dragging a single slide out, and then, while still holding on to that slide, selecting the other slides you want to move with it. Slides can also be nested, particularly useful if you want to organize your presentation by topic or would like to collapse a group of nested slides in order to free more space in the navigator. 

By tapping a slide in the navigator and tapping again, you can cut, copy, paste, delete, or choose to skip a slide. Skipping a slide allows the user to elect not to play it during a presentation without having to delete it. Once a user opts to skip a slide, that slide compresses into a narrow line which can be brought back into the show through the same process.

The toolbar

The toolbar, as stated previously, is where a much of the more advanced functionality can be reached. On the left-hand side of the toolbar there's a "My Presentations" button, which brings you back to the Keynote main menu, and an "Undo" button, which allows for multiple levels of undo. The application also has redo functionality that can be accessed by holding down on the undo icon. 

The name of your presentation lives in the center of the toolbar. On the right-hand side, from right to left, are the play button, the tools button, the animation button, the insert button, and the info button. 

The play button is fairly self explanatory: it begins the slideshow, taking up the device's entire screen. To exit a slideshow, double tap anywhere on the screen.

The tools button allows you to access the application's "find" functionality, which lets you find, or find and replace, with options to match case or whole words. The tools section is where you can turn on and off edge guides, check spelling, and slide numbers. There's also a help option here, which opens up Mobile Safari and brings you to Apple’s website.

Touching the insert button brings up a pop-up window with four different tabs across the top. The first tab, labeled media, allows you to access all of the photo albums on the iPad. (Note that there's no way to add any kind of audio track to your presentation, so if you bring a presentation in from your Mac with one, the audio will be dropped.) You select the image you want and it's placed on the main stage. From there, you can resize the image by pulling at the corners, or place it in a different spot by dragging. Resizing does maintain the aspect ratio, but you can grow and shrink an image inside of a given frame, giving you some basic cropping functionality. 

You can also insert tables, charts, and shapes from the insert button. Each table, chart, and shape dialog has six different stylings. For instance, you can insert a piechart in grayscale, earth tones, blues, etc. In the shapes dialog you can enter basic lines, arrows, squares, circles, triangles, stars, text, and more, which, once placed, can be manipulated in the same manner as a photo.

Once you've placed an object, you can begin styling it using the information icon in the toolbar. To do so you must first activate the object you want to style by tapping it. A blue bounding box will appear around the selected object, and from there you can also choose to tap the object again in order to cut, copy, paste, delete, or replace it. Styling objects vary depending on what kind of object you select. If the object is an image, you can add pre-defined borders and shadows, custom shadows and reflections, the level of opacity, or stylize a border. If you select a text object,  you can set a pre-defined style, select fonts, font size, borders, fill, and effects. To edit the actual content of text, double-tap a section of it on the main staging area to bring up the built-in keyboard.

While animations would have been very easy to do poorly, Apple did a nice job of making them simple to apply, but powerful enough not to lose their visual appeal. Animations can be applied between slides by selecting a slide and hitting the animation icon, or they can be applied to any element on a slide the same way. 

The list of animations is impressive, with a total of 13 options that range from simple, like appear and dissolve, to more complex, like flashbulb and cube. You can also fine-tune the timing and direction of effects, as well as the order in which they appear. And Magic Move, the effect that Apple first included in the desktop version of Keynote last year, is also included, allowing for some really impressive visual effects.

When you're finally ready to show your presentation, you tap the "play" button and you're off.  If you tap and hold on the presentation screen, a red laser pointer appears under your finger; this is particularly handy if you're using the iPad display adapter to show the presentation on a larger screen.

Could I make an entire presentation on Keynote for the iPad? Yes, I could. Would I want to?  Well, using touch to interact with objects makes the experience more enjoyable, so why not? The iPad is a decent device for making and displaying informal presentations, as long as you make sure to tweak any presentation made on a desktop for the iPad.

Pages: where documents go for typos

When you create a new document in Pages, the app allows you to pick from one of 16 different templates. The templates range from pretty standard word processing to page layouts for posters and thank-you cards. 

While Keynote can only be run in landscape mode, Pages can run in either portrait or landscape. When held in landscape orientation, just the page and the keyboard are displayed, delegating the app primarily to text entry duty. The majority of the app's features and functionality can only be accessed in portrait mode. The main document area can be zoomed in, just like a Keynote presentation, up to 200 percent, and moved by dragging it with a single finger.  

There are two major UI elements of Pages: the toolbar and the ruler. The majority of basic text formatting happens on the ruler. Selecting text isn’t easy—it would be much easier with an actual keyboard with arrow keys. You can make text bold, italic, or underlined, or change the alignment of the text. You can also manually enter a tab, line break, column break, or page break. Apple has a number of presets for text, including styles such as title, headings, bullets, and captions. You can adjust margins and indentations by dragging stops on the ruler back and forth.

The toolbar in Pages isn’t all that different from Keynote; the only changes are that there's a “full screen” button and a document setup option inside the tools icon. Everything else is largely the same, with a few tweaks here and there. You can select how you want to wrap text around objects, and you can add up to four columns and change line spacing.

The document setup portion of the tools section allows you to edit the template of the open document. This is done with an interesting, blueprint-styled interface. The size of the page can be switched between A4 and letter, but there is no way to change the aspect of the page, although some users have found ways to get around this limitation. From this screen, you can edit the header and footer that displays on the page, and change the size of the editable area. You can also add text or images that appear on every page of the document.

The main problem I found with Pages is that there are no arrow keys on the iPad's keyboard.  I find highlighting text, copying and pasting, and other forms of text manipulation to be infuriating on the iPad. It isn’t that it's a bad system—it’s probably as good as it can be, given that the device relies entirely on touch.  An external keyboard would make the application better, but at that point you're practically carrying around a laptop wherever you go. The iPad, a keyboard, and Pages could make a decent word processor for a kid, but with the abundance of cheap laptops, desktops, and older machines that can do the same thing for cheaper, it’s hard to justify the cost.

Running the Numbers

If you are looking for more templates, Numbers has what you want. With over 16 templates, there’s something for everyone, and they aren’t just cosmetically altered spreadsheets. Apple has included templates for attendance, employee schedules, and even travel planning. 

The Numbers UI is very similar to Pages, but instead of a toolbar and a ruler, Numbers makes use of a toolbar and tabs that look like they belong in a filing cabinet. Sheets are added by touching the tab that contains the plus sign, and they're renamed by double-tapping on the name. The tabs can be swiped back and forth—four fit in portrait mode at one time, five while in landscape. Tabs can be duplicated and deleted by activating and then tapping one more time to bring up the duplicate and delete options.

The Numbers toolbar is almost identical to the other applications in the suite. The main menu and undo functionality are on the left side of the bar, the title is in the middle, and the fullscreen button, tools, and insert and info options are on the right. 

The fullscreen button has the same functionality as in Pages, while tools is somewhat less populated, with only find and replace, help, and the option to toggle spellcheck and edge guides on and off. The insert button gives the same options as all of the other apps with media, tables, charts, and shapes. The charts section gives the user five different templates to choose from in six different color schemes. Tables has nine different options, all of which are 2D. There is no support for three-dimensional charts in Numbers for iPad.

The manner in which you add a chart is somewhat different from what you may be used to.  In Numbers for iPad, you first select a chart style and the chart is then added to the current sheet. After the chart is added, you double-tap the chart, and then select the data you want to include in it. I find the process of selecting which cells to include in your chart frustrating at best. It’s awkward trying to grab the bounding box around a cell and drag it, especially when the cells can be so small. Highlighting cells in a spreadsheet is definitely a task best left to mice.

The info button is packed with options, depending upon what is selected. If you have a chart selected, you have the option of changing the color scheme; turning the chart title, legend, and border on and off; changing all things font-related; labeling data points; and changing the chart type. You can also change axis-related settings, including major and minor tick marks, and the value scale. Further, if you double-tap a chart you're able to change whether the program plots rows as a series or columns as a series. You can add new rows and columns here.

Tables offer quite a few options for customizations. You can change the number of header rows and columns, as well as footer rows. You can change the color of cells, format the text inside of them, and change their alignment. There are a number of different formats to choose from, including number, currency, percentage, date and time, duration, a checkbox, a star rating, and normal text. You can go even further by holding down on the blue arrow next to the format, which gives you more options, like number of decimal points, separators, accounting style, and type of currency for the currency format.

Apple deals with all of a spreadsheet's different possible value inputs in a rather elegant way. Whenever the keyboard inside of Numbers comes up from the bottom of the screen, the formula bar sits on top of it like a hat. To the left of that bar there are a number or icons that toggle between custom keyboard layouts. There's a large number pad which also includes a star rating button and checkbox button. A time keyboard comes up when you touch the clock icon; this icon toggles between date and time and duration, loading increments of time in the formula bar so that you can change between weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds. The ’T’ button brings up the standard text keyboard, which can obviously be used to enter whatever text you want into a cell. The equals button brings up a custom keyboard for entering in functions and equations; this includes a function button which opens a pop-up view containing a variety of different function types from trigonometric to logical and informational. The different keyboards, and the way they're are toggled back and forth, really is an elegant solution. And because you can add custom keyboards, entering data gets even easier.

The inclusion of checkboxes and star ratings allows you to use the application as a pseudo database solution, but there are likely better solutions for that kind of work (e.g., database software like Bento, or applications specializing in a single task like taking attendance, or grade tracking). Resizing tables, moving entire columns, and similar tasks are easily done with many of the same multi-touch gestures we previously discussed.  Unfortunately, cells are by nature small, and they don’t lend themselves to easy manipulation with fingers, especially if you are dealing with a small number of cells. Beautifully designed, just hard to implement due to the nature of spreadsheets.

"Well, I’d like to visit the moon"

In the end, using iWork for the iPad is a lot like going to the moon. It might be a nice place to visit, and it may even be fun to bounce around for a bit, play a little golf, or buzz around in that sweet little moon buggy, but in the end, it’s not a place I’d like to live, or even stay for any extended amount of time. iWork is decent, but there is only so much you can do for an office suite without a full keyboard and a mouse.  

So while iWork is usable on Apple’s new "magical" device, it probably won't cut it for serious users. If you need to make an on-the-fly change to a document or presentation, you might lose some formatting or suffer some other unexpected quirks. What Apple calls file sharing, I call a pain, and the inability to print just magnifies things.

iWork for the iPad won't replace most people's desktop office suite. It may be OK for your grandmother, but without a way to print, even that is doubtful. But if you need to make a quick change or two in a cab, in coach, or in a cramped telephone booth, iWork is definitely serviceable.