Additional editing features include adjustable paragraph spacing, find and replace, and word count. Other elements, including named styles and paragraph borders and backgrounds, don’t appear at all but are still preserved when you save. The app displays some imported elements, such as graphics and tables, without letting you edit them. It also offers a good range of formatting controls. And, Google Docs can’t convert Word documents larger than 2MB.ĭocuments To Go Premium DataViz’s Documents To Go Premium ($17 ) preserves nearly all formatting and document characteristics when you move files between the Mac and iPad. For example, margins, table spacing, headers, and footers may change in undesirable ways, and custom paragraph and character styles may be lost. As with Pages, that may entail a considerable loss of formatting. Unfortunately, though you can upload nearly any file to Google Docs, if you want to edit documents online, you must let Google Docs convert them to its own format. All of this would seem to be a good fit for the iPad, too. Many businesses have standardized on Google Docs because it’s a convenient platform that requires no software beyond a Web browser, provides automatic backups and versioning, and makes sharing files with co-workers easy. Edit Word Documents with Google DocsĪnother approach is to rely on Google Docs, Google’s free Web-based office suite.
Pages delivers a full range of word processing features with an interface optimized for the iPad. But if maintaining fidelity with the original formatting is your top priority when working with Word documents on an iPad, you’ll want to look for a third-party solution. So, if you’re content to keep your Word docs in Pages format once they’re imported-or give up any unsupported formatting-the iWork apps are arguably your best choice. docx) or export a Pages file in a Word format, you permanently lose essential formatting, tracked changes, comments, and other file attributes.
Unfortunately, when you import a file in Microsoft Word format (.doc or.
As long as you’re running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, using the latest version of Pages for Mac and iOS, and have an Apple iCloud account, transferring documents between a given app on your Mac(s) and iOS device(s) is simple thanks to iCloud’s Documents in the Cloud feature.