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Unlike the iPhone and iPod touch, the iPad was designed with the needs of typists in mind. The screen size, the large virtual keyboard in landscape orientation, and the support for external keyboards make the iPad a natural choice for word processing on the go. For many people, that means reading, editing, and saving Microsoft Word files. Even though there’s no iPad version of Word, you can work with Word files on your iPad if you’re willing to accept a few compromises.
Word for Mac saves a copy of the unsaved document named as Word Work File in a Temporary folder. Word for Mac includes an AutoRecovery option. It is turned on by default. The app will automatically save a copy of an open Word file every 10 minutes.
Read Word files on your iPad Just need to read Microsoft Word documents? All you have to do is get the documents onto your iPad; Apple’s iOS can display them natively. For example, you can email documents to yourself as attachments, or use an app designed for transferring and viewing documents, such as Avatron Software’s $10, Good.iWare’s $5, or Readdle’s $5 ( ). Editing your Word documents is a bit trickier. There are several good options, but all come with a qualification: they support only a subset of Word’s features. So, no matter which method you use, you may have to live without certain features—and in most cases, accept the loss of some formatting as well.
Edit Word documents with Apple’s Pages One easy option for editing Word documents is Apple’s $10 iWork app ( ). It can import and export documents in Microsoft Word format, and offers a powerful and easy-to-use environment for creating and editing files. As long as you’re running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, using the latest version of Pages for Mac and iOS, and have an, transferring documents between a given app on your Mac(s) and iOS device(s) is simple thanks to iCloud’s Documents in the Cloud feature. Unfortunately, when you import a file in Microsoft Word format (.doc or.docx) or export a Pages file in a Word format, you permanently lose essential formatting, tracked changes, comments, and other file attributes. So, if you’re content to keep your Word docs in Pages format once they’re imported—or give up any unsupported formatting—the iWork apps are arguably your best choice.
But if maintaining fidelity with the original formatting is your top priority when working with Word documents on an iPad, you’ll want to look for a third-party solution. Pages delivers a full range of word processing features with an interface optimized for the iPad.
Edit Word Documents with Google Docs Another approach is to rely on, Google’s free Web-based office suite. Many businesses have standardized on Google Docs because it’s a convenient platform that requires no software beyond a Web browser, provides automatic backups and versioning, and makes sharing files with co-workers easy.
All of this would seem to be a good fit for the iPad, too. Unfortunately, though you can upload nearly any file to Google Docs, if you want to edit documents online, you must let Google Docs convert them to its own format. As with Pages, that may entail a considerable loss of formatting. For example, margins, table spacing, headers, and footers may change in undesirable ways, and custom paragraph and character styles may be lost. And, Google Docs can’t convert Word documents larger than 2MB. Furthermore, editing documents on your iPad can be an exercise in frustration.
Google shows iPad users the mobile version of Google Documents for word-processing documents by default, which lets you edit text but offers no formatting controls whatsoever. If you tap the Desktop link to display the full version, you’ll likely see one or more error messages followed by an interface that’s only partially functional, since it wasn’t designed for touch screens. (For example, you may find it impossible to select text—a pretty significant problem for a word processor!) The latest version of Nikita Lutsenko’s $4, which offers editing and offline storage of Google Docs, lets you switch more easily between Google’s mobile and desktop views, but because it uses a built-in browser for editing documents online, its editing capabilities have the same limitations as in Safari. Try editing with an Office suite But that’s not the end of the story.
You can edit your Word document on an iPad by using the native editors built into any of numerous other iPad apps that connect directly to Google Docs or other services. All five of the following all-in-one office suites for the iPad include word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation tools. They all can edit documents from Microsoft Word and offer direct ties to a variety of cloud-based services, including Google Docs and, making it easy to get documents in and out.
![Mac Mac](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125627362/738834554.png)
Documents To Go Premium DataViz’s ($17; ) preserves nearly all formatting and document characteristics when you move files between the Mac and iPad. It also offers a good range of formatting controls. The app displays some imported elements, such as graphics and tables, without letting you edit them. Other elements, including named styles and paragraph borders and backgrounds, don’t appear at all but are still preserved when you save. Additional editing features include adjustable paragraph spacing, find and replace, and word count. Office² HD Byte Squared’s ($8; ) preserves nearly all formatting and document characteristics during the round trip from Microsoft Word on a Mac to the iPad and back. It also offers a respectable range of formatting controls for word-processing documents, such as font, size, style, text and highlight color, alignment, indentation, and bulleted and numbered lists.
You can adjust paragraph spacing; create multiple columns; add or edit tables and graphics; set page, column, and section breaks; set margins and tab stops; add footnotes and endnotes; check your spelling, and see your current word count. It also has a find (without replace) feature. Office² HD is the only one of the suites to fully support change tracking.
A few predefined style names are recognized, but styles from imported documents can’t be edited. Office² HD can display, but not edit, document elements such as paragraph borders and background colors. Office2 HD is unique among iOS word processors in fully supporting Word-style change tracking.
The $6 from the same developer, has all these word-processing features without the spreadsheet or presentation capabilities. Polaris Office Infraware’s $13 includes a table editor and tools to add shapes, freeform lines, and other graphics to your documents. It also offers internal bookmarks and external hyperlinks, find and replace, page layout options, and somewhat awkward comment editing. Polaris Office leaves much formatting intact (including comments), but strips out or modifies other elements such that the edited document may not closely resemble the original. Quickoffice Pro HD Quickoffice’s ($20; ) covers the basics and nicely preserves most formatting during the import-edit-export process, but offers little in the way of extra features—two exceptions include word count and find-and-replace. Smart Office 2 Picsel’s $10 leaves most Word document elements intact, but some, such as paragraph borders and backgrounds, change tracking, and comments, are removed when you save the document. (In addition, as I write this, Smart Office 2 doesn’t yet take advantage of the latest iPad’s Retina display, so text looks fuzzy.) Pick your tool If you need to edit Word documents on an iPad, first consider whether they’ll need to travel back and forth between your iPad and Microsoft Office.
If they don’t, Apple’s Pages will likely give you the best experience. If you do need to preserve full Office compatibility, Office² HD is the clear winner for word processing.
(For yet another option, see ') Senior contributor Joe Kissell is the senior editor of TidBits and the author of the ebook (TidBITS Publishing, 2011).
Since switching to Mac, I’ve abandoned almost all of the programs that I used on Windows, with the exception of. This is mainly because Word is so widely used by others, that I’ve effectively been “forced” to install it, even though I hardly use any other application in the. This is frustrating for two main reasons: Office is expensive, and it takes up over 500MB of my hard drive. Luckily, there are a selection of free and highly accomplished alternative word processing apps for Mac, some of which not only handle Word documents, but that you may even find improve on Word itself.
Writer Writer is part of, a cross platform multilingual Java-based office suite that’s designed as a free replacement for Microsoft Office. Writer is the word processing component, letting you open and edit Word documents (including.docx), export to PDF, and use it as a WYSIWYG editor for creating web pages. Some prefer to install which has taken OpenOffice and customised the interface for Mac. AbiWord A better solution than Writer for those working on slower Macs, like Writer, AbiWord lets you open Word documents, save to.doc format, and export to both PDF and HTML.
The disadvantage is that it doesn’t support.docx format, and may sometimes alter the formatting in Word documents so that they appear slight skewed. For those working on older Macs though, it’s an excellent alternative.
Bean Designed specifically for Macs, Bean is based on, so it looks great. Bean can also open and save in Word format but note that it can’t handle footnotes, images or pre-defined styles, and is only partially compatible with Word’s file formats. In addition, it doesn’t work with.docx, hyperlinks are imported as text, and exporting tables doesn’t work well. In terms of speed, however, Bean is excellent. Google Drive Google’s online office suite is handy replacement for opening and saving Word documents.
All you need is a Google account to get started. Google Drive features a clean interface, autosave feature, spell check and it can save your documents either to your account, publish it as a web page or automatically e-mail it as a Word document. You can even invite others to collaborate with you on a document. ThinkFree Online The suite isn’t free, but it’s online counterpart, ThinkFree Online, is. It only allows you to open and view any kind of Office document, including.doc and.docx and then embed, convert, share, upload or search them for free. You can perform basic functions for free but you have to sign-up for extra features such as the offline file management “Power Tool”. If you’re looking to open Word Documents on Mac,.
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