Dan Shafer's Blog

I have come to really like my iPad. Even though I was at first skeptical about its real utility, I have nonetheless become somewhat enamored of things like its immediate availabtility, immersive user experience, and wonderful screen quality. And I've found a few really useful apps, including replacing my Kindle2 with my iPad and the Kindle app.

Still, there has been one massive hole in the app scene without which I could not declare the iPad a suitable productivity tool: a way to create and edit Google Docs (and as a nice bonus, work with documents in my Dropbox account).

That gap seems to have slammed shut with the recent release of a highly usable version of Office2 HD from byteSquared.

I’ve written this review by starting it out on my iPad using Office2 HD, saving it locally, then moving it to my gDocs directory, opening it and editing some more. Then I saved it on gDocs and went back to the iPad to load the revised version. It all flowed quite smoothly.

Then I tried moving the document from the local Office2 directory to my Dropbox on my iPad. That, too, went flawlessly in both directions. You can either move or copy files to and from all of these sources. If, e.g., I move a document from gDocs to my local files on my iPad, the file disappears from gDocs. I can then edit it in Office2, then save it to any of the three locations: back in gDocs, over to Dropbox or locally.

The basic word processor in Office2 seems quite capable.  Though it only supports commands for font and size and formatting for bold, italic, underlined, color, highlight and alignment, it does those things quite smoothly and efficiently.

I've hooked up an Apple Wireless Keyboardn to the iPad (something I had no reason to do before) and turned my iPad into a highy useful portable document editor. It is capable of editing formatted text documents and spreadsheet files within some limits but I'm sure that the program will continue to evolve.

One thing you do have to be careful about is to keep track of where the version of the document you are now editing is stored. If you press the iPad Home button in mid-edit, you're fine as long as the document is on your local file system. But if it's stored remotely, you lose all unsaved edits by doing that. I recommend always copying or moving the document from the remote server to the local iPad and editing it there, then saving it back when finished. It's a couple of extra steps but the security will be worth it.

I did document one apparent bug. If you have a local document saved and you want to move it to Dropbox, and a document of the same name already appears in DropBox, the file fails to save silently, leaving the old, presumably obsolete document in place on the Dropbox server. This is particularly problematic because the iPad version of the Dropbox app does not allow you to delete items. Ouch.

At $7.99, though, Office2 HD is a real bargain. Highly recommended.