The iPad, Office and the Cloud (A Plea)

I watched the lead-up to the launch of the iPad with interest. It looked like a fabulous device but the main thing that I needed it for was to be able to replace Microsoft Office on my laptop. For general day-to-day working, a tablet that gives me web access, email and the ability to punch out letters and do some spreadsheets would be ideal. I wouldn’t need to power up the laptop every time – which also means finding a space to put it half of the time, and often plug it in.

However, initial reports said that trying to manage Office activities was difficult if not impractical. This is due to the iPad not offering any traditional style of filestore (like folders) which means you can’t easily drop something onto the iPad, work on it and then export it back to where it came from. True, there is some local storage embedded within iWork, but you need to connect the iPad to a computer to be able to really sync these documents – and if you’re going to do that why not just work on the computer!

The challenge for me comes from the choice of mediums I use, principally Jungledisk in the Cloud. Both my laptop and my base PC connect to a virtual drive located within Jungledisk on Cloud servers over at Rackspace. My PC backs up daily to this cloud also, and other computers we have in the office also back up to this cloud storage. This provides a perfect central repository which we can access from anywhere. For example, I was in a meeting at our accountant’s office recently and needed a file – I logged in to Jungledisk via the web access, downloaded the spreadsheet, opened it on the local machine and completed the work there and then. I did not need to go back to the office and email the file – I could just access it.

For the iPad to be effective for me, I would need to be able to do the same. Aside from the times when I am programming or designing, I don’t need a laptop – I could easily write this blog post on an iPad as it is written in a browser-based interface. I use email on the iPhone regularly (more than the laptop) and it would be great if the iPad could access those cloud-based files.

I held off buying an iPad because of the reports about the (MS) Office issues. I have looked for other applications that could solve the issue, but none really come up to the job – even the virtual/web-based office solutions aren’t great as they require me to change the way I work in order to use them; ie move my files out of my store and into “their” store. This creates complexity as my work files are split into two or more locations.

One thing I did discover was that I could browse my Jungledisk from the iPad and import documents into iWork Papers from there, edit them and save them locally. BUT, I couldn’t get them back to Jungledisk – I could only email them or send them to iWork.com. And I didn’t have any control over fonts (which is a pain when you’re using brand guidelines) or layout because Papers interpreted the tabs from MS Word differently.

The same issue is true of Microsoft Office on the Web. The web versions are suitable replacements for Office (sort of), but you have to move your files into Sky Drive in order to access them effectively (Microsoft’s version of iWork.com). Google Docs is much the same – you have to have your files in Google’s repository.

So, dear Curated Computing provider (Apple, Google & Microsoft, et al), please provide me with an Office application that allows me to keep my documents and all other files (Photoshop, PHP, images, etc, etc) in one place in *my* virtual office cloud and edit/save them from there. Life would be so much simpler. And mobile.

Of course – if any of you reading this know of such a solution that can be used from an iPad (and other computers), please leave a message in the comments below. Thanks.

Related Reading from this Blog

1. The iPad, Office & The Cloud (A Solution)
2. Cloud Computing vs Dedicated Servers
3. Setup cannot find office.en-us\dwtrig20.exe
4. Cloud vs Traditional Hosting
5. When the Clouds break; Risks in the Public Cloud