iWork App Fails To Impress Users
April 7th, 2010
Apple’s bid to make the iPad something at least vaguely resembling a machine you can do significant work on have taken a major blow, with news that iWorks apps for the device have major incompatibilities with their desktop brethren. Said a poster on the Apple support forum:
The part that comes as a huge and surprising disappointment – TO ME – is that my Keynote and Pages documents are altered when they are converted to the iPad version. Grouped objects are ungrouped (this for me is a big issue given my complex presentations), endnotes and footnotes are not imported in Pages, Table of Content changes to regular text, some fonts cannot be used on the iPad, etc.
This means, for instance, that I won’t be able to do the following: Transfer a Pages document (with footnotes, etc.) to iPad, edit it while on the road, then sync that file back to my Macbook when I reach home. The moment I move the file to the iPad, it loses a whole bunch of things that are standard on most documents that I create (e.g., footnotes and endnotes).
Similarly, I cannot create a Keynote presentation on my Macbook (with grouped objects, for example) and expect it to transfer intact to the iPad. To use the iPad’s Keynote I will need to change all my existing KeyNote classnotes (hundreds of pages) to remove the fonts that the iPad does not like, to remove grouped objects and other formatting that the iPad does not like, and so on. Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the inclination to dumb down my years of carefully-prepared presentations in this manner
I had thought that the iPad will give me the ability to make presentations more easily and to edit documents while on the road, without having to lug around a laptop. Looks like I am not the target audience for this device yet.
Footnotes, groupings, embedded audio, certain fonts, 3D charts, track changes, table of contents, tables, none of them work properly. The complete inability to shuttle easily between desktop and iPad versions severely knocks the potential usefulness of the applications, and gives me serious doubts about using the iPad as a work machine.
[via ZDNet]
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