document compatibility on iPad?????

[bobTX10]

Hey guys! I've been an avid reader and enjoy reading these threads but now have a question of my own.

I will be getting an iPad in the near future as it will be mostly for school. I feel that the iPad could easily replace my heavy HP laptop in class as I have used it at the apple store browsing my school webpages with ease. The only concern I have is iWorks, specifically the pages app. In school, I will be writing many papers and documents. How compatible is pages to microsoft office? Could I easily start a document on my iPad, email it to myself, and then open it in Word and continue my work. What if I start a document in Word, will Pages make a perfect image of my work so i could continue my progress. Im just hoping for a seamless integration between the two as that would be awesome!

If any of you guys have any experience doing this it would be great to get some feedback!

 

[Night Spring]

I often create or edit documents in Pages on my iPad, then finish them up in Word on my Windows PC. Passing documents back and forth between Word and Pages works ok, as long as their formatting is simple. There are all sorts of little formatting changes that creep in when I do this, so I always do the final formatting in Word. I wouldn't recommend it for complex documents, especially if you need footnotes/endnotes, but for my purposes, it works very well.

 

[luxborealis]

B+ for compatibility

I love Pages and find that I am far more productive with it in the same amount of time compared to Word. However, I frequently need to send Word documents to colleagues who have not yet seen the light and may still be on the dark side. to do that, I just "Save As..." my pages doc as a Word doc. Pages has no trouble opening .doc or .docx, too.

I find the compatibility very good, but not perfect. A simple text document translates fine with no problems. Even more involved text formatting translates well as does most page formatting. However, the more intricate the formatting, the more chance of there being unsupported changes. For example, some paragraph formatting such as underlining, text boxes and sometimes columns do not translate well.

For sending docs to others, lately I've been making greater use of "Export to PDF" - especially when I don't want the doc altered or edited. it's not difficult to alter a PDF, but it is a step or two more than many people want to do. But that doesn't help you in moving documents you are working on.

I'd say go for it! Get that iPad and go wild!

 

[bobTX10]

Man this is some great information!!!

So what it is sounding like is if I keep it simple text, I should have no problem at all, which is mostly what I do. I dont use footnotes, but I will be using headers a lot for APA style papers. But all in all it sounds more reassuring that I could make this work. Thanks guys!!