Help with me workflow!!!

Mr.Pink · 15 Feb 2012 at 10:53

I have PC desktop and laptop ingrained into me, but have recently seen the beauty of the iPad as a mobile device.

I am struggling with using the ipad 'on the road', especailly when i visit settings without wirless or 3g. and my workplace is PC only.

What i want to be able to do is to access and ammend microsoft office docuements and PDF's whilst 'offline'.

There are soo many apps, Evernote, Quickoffice, Iannotate, goodreader and on and on, but all of them seem slighlty clunky, or self-contained. An example is annotating a PDF, and saving it to a repository, to later view that PDF in a generic PDF reader. I haven't found a solution.

At the moment i seem to be in overkill mode, Sugarsync, Drobox, Evernote, Iannotate and quickoffice.

Has anyone got a nice simple workfow for this scenario that involves minimal apps?

ChocolateStarfishRammer · 15 Feb 2012 at 11:08

Probably just a decent netbook would be best then?..

Something like the Acer One.. great battery.. not too small to use.. could store all your data and then sync when you get internet.

lamboman · 15 Feb 2012 at 13:37

RichMawdsley has the best solution. I was having this discussion with a friend's dad the other day; while the iPad (and tablets as a whole) are great devices for surfing and presenting documents, they are extremely limited when it comes to actual work.

If you're willing to part with the iPad, something like an 11" MBA is quite a good substitute, being light enough to hold up a bit like a e-reader while being powerful enough to be a serious mobile work machine, and having similar dimensions to the iPad.

Evernote, Pages, Skitch, are but a few that are fantastic apps available on the Mac (and you will definitely be able to find similar offerings for Windows).

If you want to save, and you are a die-hard PC guy, the options are far more open, merely because you can get very cheap notebooks to do the job. That said, the concern with a netbook over an ultraportable is always going to be power.

uniQ · 15 Feb 2012 at 15:19

Goodreader is one of the best for what you want lets you edit, read and annotate all manner of document types, import/export from/to dropbox, servers, ftp, web downloads backup to iTunes/iCloud etc etc.

You can choose to preserve the original when you annotate and create a copy etc.

Definitely worth a look.