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Chapter 1: Business Apps In This Chapter ✓ iWork ✓ Quickoffice Pro ✓ Dropbox ✓ Dragon Dictation ✓ OmniGraffle ✓ iThoughtsHD ✓ iAnnotate PDF ✓ PowerME HD ✓ Go To Meeting ✓ Agendas ✓ Prompster and Teleprompt+ for iPad ne compelling strength of all Apple iOS devices is the App OStore — and its hundreds of thousands of apps you can download and then use to do just about anything you might want to do. (iOS is the name of the operating sys- tem that runs the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.) In this chapter, I show you some of the best apps for business, including some useful productivity apps. I tell you the qualities that make the app stand out and describe things you can do with it so that you can decide whether you need it on your iPad. Some of COPYRIGHTEDthe apps I describe in this chapter MATERIAL were written specifically for the iPad; others, however, were written by their developers to run as native apps on both the iPad and iPhone (or iPod touch) — the plus-sign (+) symbol appears next to the prices in the App Store for these hybrid apps (see Book I, Chapter 5, for more about buying apps). You can buy a hybrid app and then use it on whatever iOS devices you own. For the latest iPad updates, be sure to check out my website at www.ipad madeclear.com. 440_9781118496961-bk06ch01.indd0_9781118496961-bk06ch01.indd 513513 111/30/121/30/12 22:42:42 PPMM 514 iWork iWork by Apple, Inc. $9.99 per application What you can do with it: Pages: Write letters and reports. Numbers: Create and manage spreadsheets. Keynote: Make gorgeous, professional- looking presentations. iWork is Apple’s productivity suite, made up of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Book IV covers the basics of using these apps. This chapter helps you decide whether they’re right for you. Pages is Apple’s advanced word-processor and page layout program for the Mac, and now for the iPad. It’s one of the best apps available to demonstrate on the iPad how the touchscreen interface can be used to get things done. Pages for iPad was built from the ground up to create letters, résumés, thank-you notes and cards, newsletters, proposals, reports, term papers, and even posters and flyers. It’s a pretty darn good page layout app, as well. Everything in the iWork suite of apps was designed to be accomplished by making gestures (pinch, zoom, tap, and swipe) and using the onscreen key- board, including layout and formatting and placing graphics such as photos, charts, and graphs. The Pages app comes supplied with 16 templates and a library of tables, customizable charts, and shapes. You can also add photos from your photo libraries, as I did in Figure 1-1, including any images you may have created in another iPad app and saved to your Photos library. Figure 1-1: Picking a style for the inserted photo. 440_9781118496961-bk06ch01.indd0_9781118496961-bk06ch01.indd 514514 111/30/121/30/12 22:42:42 PPMM iWork 515 One cool characteristic of Pages is the way objects work. After you drop, say, a photo into your document, you can move the photo, resize it, change its presentation style, or even rotate it — and the text simply autoflows around it in real time. The app makes layout and design so easy on your iPad that you may have to try it to truly appreciate it. For more on the Pages app, see Book IV, Chapter 2. The Numbers spreadsheet app is useful for working with small-business and home-office spreadsheets, maintaining budgets and logs, and organizing teams and other group competitions. It’s an even better app for turning your spreadsheets and data into gorgeous charts and graphs that you can use to make your reports, presentations, and other documents look great. Book VI Chapter 1 As in Pages, all tasks in Numbers were designed to be done by making ges- tures. Filling in data in a spreadsheet, changing colors, adding a chart or Business Apps graph, resizing documents — all these tasks can be completed quickly and easily on your iPad. You can see a sample chart and data set in Figure 1-2. Some tasks are even easier and faster to complete using this app on the iPad than performing them on your desktop computer using a full-blown spread- sheet application. Figure 1-2: Double-tap an element in your spreadsheet to pull up resizing handles and the Cut/Copy/Delete selection buttons. Numbers comes supplied with 16 templates (checklists, budgets, invoices, schedules, and rosters, for example), and the library of charts and graphs contains nine different varieties for you to use. All nine types feature several 440_9781118496961-bk06ch01.indd0_9781118496961-bk06ch01.indd 515515 111/30/121/30/12 22:42:42 PPMM 516 iWork different color palette choices that can then be further edited. The same statement applies to the included shapes: You can edit the color, style, and other attributes in just a few taps. For more on the Numbers app, see Book IV, Chapter 3. Keynote on the iPad makes great-looking presentations and is just about as feature-rich as Keynote on a Mac, which makes it better than PowerPoint for Mac or Windows. Keynote is perfect for anyone wanting to work on a presen- tation on the go. All 16 terrific-looking Keynote templates include several premade slides that comport to a different theme (such as Modern Portfolio, Showroom, Chalkboard, or Photo Portfolio, which you can see in Figure 1-3). You can create your own presentation without a template, of course, but if you want to start with a style all laid out for you, try using a template. Figure 1-3: Choosing a transition in a Keynote presentation. Most of the time, a presentation displays on a projector or another type of large display; if you have a small group, however (say, a couple of customers or your boss), you can simply create a presentation in Keynote and display it directly on your iPad! After you’re working on a presentation, you have access to awesome transi- tions and effects, each of which has options and controls that are a breeze to understand and use. You can add photos and images from your Photos library, and the app has the same charts, graphs, and shapes that come with 440_9781118496961-bk06ch01.indd0_9781118496961-bk06ch01.indd 516516 111/30/121/30/12 22:42:42 PPMM Quickoffice Pro 517 Pages and Numbers. Creating new slides is easy, and editing them is even easier. For more on the Keynote app, see Book IV, Chapter 4. Quickoffice Pro by Quickoffice, Inc. $14.99 What you can do with it: Create and edit word-processing and spread- Book VI sheet documents in the Microsoft Word and Excel formats. You can also Chapter 1 view PowerPoint files, but you can’t edit them. Business Apps This app is intended for people who are more comfortable using Microsoft Word and Excel than Apple’s iWork approach. Quickoffice Pro for iPad is built on the same paradigms as Word and Excel — in fact, its raison d’être is to view, create, and edit files in Microsoft Office file formats. You can switch among your Mac, PC, and iPad with Word and Excel files (you can only view PowerPoint files with Quickoffice, as of this writing), as long as you use DOC, DOCX, DOT, DOTX, TXT, XLS, XLSX, XLT, and XLTX file formats. Unless and until Microsoft brings the real deal to iOS, Quickoffice is the best way to work on your Office files on the iPad in an Office-y kind of way. Another useful aspect of Quickoffice is that it has Dropbox support built into it. The excellent Dropbox utility gives you access to files on a variety of devices, including iPad. (I talk about Dropbox in more detail in the next sec- tion.) With Dropbox support in Quickoffice, you can create a Word docu- ment on your PC at work and put it in your Dropbox. Then, when you’re at the coffee shop that afternoon and you need to edit it, simply open it from your Dropbox in Quickoffice on your iPad. When you get home to your Mac, you can open the file from Dropbox there, too! If for some bizarre reason Dropbox doesn’t float your boat, Quickoffice also supports Google Docs and Box (www.box.net). The Quickoffice Pro app offers a nifty navigation tool, too: Press and hold the right margin in a multipage document to see the thumbnail view of all pages in your document, as shown in Figure 1-4. Just slide your finger down the page until you see the thumbnail of the page you want to jump to, and you’re there. It’s a nifty feature. Quickoffice doesn’t have a lot of fancy formatting tricks, like Pages and Numbers do, but it’s the best app to use if you have to, or are accustomed to, working with Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, or another Office-like produc- tivity suite. 440_9781118496961-bk06ch01.indd0_9781118496961-bk06ch01.indd 517517 111/30/121/30/12 22:42:42 PPMM 518 Dropbox Figure 1-4: Using the cool thumbnail-navigation feature to go to another page. Dropbox by Dropbox Free — Hybrid What you can do with it: Access important files on your iPad anywhere you have an Internet connection. If you’re doing serious work on your iPad, whether it’s for business or another type of task, Dropbox is the easiest and best way to move files from your iPad to any other computer or device, or from another device to your iPad.