Microsoft Office for iPad – Not Going to Happen Anytime Soon

I know that you can get Microsoft Office for the Mac and if you are a heavy Excel user, it might still be the best thing to do. The Numbers Application from Apple is great for 99% of Mac users but not good enough for the proper Excel geeks. Despite this being so, I can’t get my head around the way that some are asking why there is not a MS Office for the iPad. Seems to me that the back to basics and efficient way of working that you can get on an iPad and the bloatware of Office is not going to be a good match.

Getting into Pages

For those of us that like writing, iPad apps have us covered with the excellent Pages application which is just excellent as a DTP application, more so than a great word processor. There is a version for the Mac and one for the iPad too. The iCloud offering from Apple will make it really easy to share documents to all your devices so that you can continue working on something back at the desktop computer. ICloud uploads to the service from where you create the data, on the iPad for example, and then it gets pushed out to where ever else you have Pages installed.

Scrivener the Writers Best Tool

My favourite writers/authors tool is Scrivener, designed from the ground up to provide all that the professional and amateur writer needs. I like the way that I can set it to synchronise a project with a folder I set up in Dropbox. When I am working on the iPad using a simple text editor, not iPad Microsoft Office, which is unlikely to become available. The text editor that suits my purpose has to have TextExpander integration to save me time. That is the case even when I am using an external bluetooth keyboard. A couple of characters and it fills in a while string of text for me.

The Daring Fireball Gives us Markdown

I would ask you to have a look at the Daring Fireball web site to get details about Markdown formatting. I use this method of working all the time. Makes the text easier to read and perfect to convert easily to html format for a web page. Yet it is still pure text and can be shared to whatever application and read without problems