Folks Doing "Real Work" On An iPad - How the Heck Do You Quickly Navigate To &Cut and Paste Text ??

[turbineseaplane]

I don't use Excel very much, but I do use it for relatively simple tasks. I have it on my iPad. I don't use it for more than updating one cell. Otherwise I go to my laptop.

I also have Word on my iPad. Use it to read documents only... Just refuse to do anything else because it is cumbersome. Unfortunately, it is a beautiful app and I'd love to use it more.

I DO use Onenote on my iPad though... Basically as a replacement for Evernote. It is plodding on the iPad, but I usually just update minor things that I've already created on my laptop.

All around very impressed with Office on iOS... Very unimpressed with Apple's decision to not allow pointing devices...

My experience as well - I do a fair bit of Excel and just "get through it" on my iPad and certainly don't do any complex worksheet creation from scratch on there - That would be my definition of "hell"

 

[sparksd]

Just a side note - I can use a Bluetooth mouse (and keyboard) with Word & Excel on my Android tablets.

 

[Mr. Buzzcut]

Yes, we can. We're all different.

It's just weird how in this particular topic we've started discussing about the need for a mouse for text editing when using a real keyboard. This makes me think some people don't really know how to use a keyboard more efficiently. And maybe if they learn to use simple shortcuts like Cmd-up arrow or Cmd-down arrow, their life will be easier and they will stop complaining about the lack of mouse support on a tablet. When editing text.

But yes, people are different, they can do whatever they want.

It's true that some text editors have very powerful keyboard shortcuts but they are unfortunately not very portable. When you learn to do something with a mouse, if it isn't already intuitive from the start, it tends to work across apps more so than advanced keyboard commands.

 

[jozero]

In case it wasn't clear I'm using "mouse" as a general stand in for "being able to select things accurately".

Is selecting things accurately not important ? That's awesome if it is. If the touch software could get my intention. Say I generally touch somewhere then speak, and SIRI guesses what my intention is. "Cut this paragraph". "Move the next 4 lines of code to method startSync". But we don't have that.

I'm not arguing old ways are better. What I'm saying is we have lost accuracy. If that's no longer important then fantastic, but I personally haven't seen most WORK can be done like that. I can't lazily kind of select text I want, place an object when designing, cutting and paste some database queries, or manipulate an object "kind of" with my fingers. That's not how WORK, well, WORKS. I'd get fired.

 

[Night Spring]

Is selecting things accurately not important ?

Yes, it is. But if you are using an external keyboard with an iPad, then selecting text using the keyboard is, for me, more accurate than using a mouse or other pointing device. Tad slower, perhaps, but more accurate.

And as for the touch interface being more inaccurate, the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that there is nothing inherent to the touch interface that makes selecting more inaccurate. The problems with selecting text in iOS with touch feel to me like the interface is a bit buggy. Work out the bugs, and it could be as accurate as a traditional pointing device. Maybe make the selection pointers slightly bigger so they are easier to grab. Make it so that once you are in selection mode, you don't get dumped out of the selection mode unless you do a very deliberate action to get out of it, for example, a "cancel selection" menu command. Slight changes like these could go a long way toward making touch only computing as smooth as mouse based computing.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Yes, it is. But if you are using an external keyboard with an iPad, then selecting text using the keyboard is, for me, more accurate than using a mouse or other pointing device. Tad slower, perhaps, but more accurate.

And as for the touch interface being more inaccurate, the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that there is nothing inherent to the touch interface that makes selecting more inaccurate. The problems with selecting text in iOS with touch feel to me like the interface is a bit buggy. Work out the bugs, and it could be as accurate as a traditional pointing device. Maybe make the selection pointers slightly bigger so they are easier to grab. Make it so that once you are in selection mode, you don't get dumped out of the selection mode unless you do a very deliberate action to get out of it, for example, a "cancel selection" menu command. Slight changes like these could go a long way toward making touch only computing as smooth as mouse based computing.

The one problem is always that you have to touch with your finger and your fingers are fat and it blocks the view of what you're doing… Whereas obviously with a mouse or other pointing device you can see the nice precise cursor without blocking your own view of what you're doing.

So they end up with the magnifier glass or the two fingers on the keyboard and other stuff..The latter of which you might as will be using a mouse/trackpad anyways as you're no longer touching exactly what/where you're interacting with which is one of the main points and benefits of touchscreen

 

[phillyboy82]

The only thing that slows me down when editing text on iOS is the keyboard repeat rate, which is too slow.
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What exactly you can't do on an iPad when typing because you don't have a mouse?

Agreed on the key repeat rate. It is especially annoying when you want to just hold the down arrow to scroll a webpage and all you get is jerky scrolling movement.

 

[Beavix]

The problems with selecting text in iOS with touch feel to me like the interface is a bit buggy

Indeed. Selecting text with touch on a web page can be almost impossible sometimes. This is one of the small things which bothers me the most on iOS.

 

[Lisat78]

I find that the two-fingers-for-trackpad gesture works with the (Apple) external bluetooth keyboard just fine on my Air 2. The on-screen keyboard doesn't need to be up, it works on the whole screen. Or at least it seems to on Ulysses which hasn't yet been updated for iOS 9.