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I mentioned last week that I had to unfortunately bring in my MacBook Pro for some minor servicing. This untimely event forced me to use my iPad as my main workstation. And man, did I need to get work done. 

Above you’ll see my setup. iPad where my MacBook Pro usually sits, Bluetooth Apple Keyboard, Bose Speakers, some external HD’s, a useless Magic Mouse (unless you have a jailbroken iPad) and Wall-E. 

The Apple Genius quoted me 3-5 days. It only took them 2 days to complete the repair and so I really only had about 1.5 days worth of full iPad usage. But for that 1.5 days I did use the iPad to continue the work that I was doing on a psychopharmacology paper that I had started on my MacBook Pro. 

Software

Three programs were essential to this “paper writing on the iPad” experiment. Papers for iPad ($14.99), GoodReader ($0.99) and Pages ($9.99). 

Pages is what I used to type with. If you’re not familiar with Pages then think of it as Apple’s equivalent to Microsoft Word. There will probably not be a version of Microsoft Word for the iPad in the forseable future, so your best bet when it comes to a word processor is Pages for the iPad. 

I use Papers on both my MacBook Pro and my iPad to store and sync all of my downloaded journal articles. It’s a great app and is so much better than having tons of paper articles littering my desk. If you’re an academic, you’ll love Papers. 

GoodReader is, I believe, an essential app for the iPad. GoodReader is (to some extent) the missing file management app that the iPad doesn’t come with. GoodReader not only handles massive PDF files, but it also opens MS Office, iWork, HTML, audio, and even video. Attachments via email that you normally wouldn’t be able to open, will probably open fine on GoodReader. 

Hardware

I did make use of my bluetooth keyboard and iPad dock. If you plan to do any type of prolonged writing on the iPad then I highly suggest purchasing a bluetooth keyboard and a dock or the bluetooth keyboard with the built-in dock.

So what did I think of the experience?

Short answer: You can get by using the iPad to write a long paper. At the end of the day, though, I still would have preferred my MacBook Pro. 

Long answer: You can get by using the iPad to do prolonged writing but you will miss using a full-fledged computer. The experience consisted of the following:

1. I emailed my unfinished paper from my MacBook Pro to myself (I did this at the Apple Store just before they took it away from me). I had been using Microsoft Word on the MacBook Pro prior to editing the file on my iPad.
2. I download the attached .docx Microsoft document from my email to my iPad. The document imported directly into Pages.
3. Pages handled my document quite well. Formatting was kept intact. Page breaks, footers, italicized and bolded fonts, and even references made it through okay. No funky weird characters upon import. Pages handled my Microsoft Word document flawlessly. This made me very happy.
4. Typing was done exclusive with my bluetooth keyboard. Like I said, if you’re going to do any type of prolonged writing on the iPad then a keyboard is a must. Seriously, a must. 
5. Pairing of the bluetooth keyboard to the iPad was easy to set up (you do this in Settings). 
6. I did noticed that whenever the bluetooth keyboard was paired with the iPad, the software keyboard would not appear on the screen. This was great as it saves a lot of real estate by not having a software keyboard on the screen while you are using a physical keyboard. 
7. When writing an academic paper, references are a must. This means that journal article are a must. And this means that you’ll be dealing with a lot of PDF’s. Fortunately, I had synced the articles that I already had with Papers. But for new articles that I searched for on the web, I used GoodRead to download those to my iPad. 
8. The main issue for me was the multi-tasking aspect. Whenever I write (on my MacBook Pro), I like to jump back and forth between the paper that I am writing and the different PDF articles that I am citing. This can become cumbersome on the iPad. If only because apps need to be relaunched whenever you navigate from them. The good thing is that both Pages and Papers remembers what you were last reading or working on. This is such a time saver and I am happy that they implemented this feature. As a side note, I should mention that Apple has announced multi-tasking in the next update to the iPad OS. So, once that happens, this complaint will be a non-issue.
9. After 1.5 days of writing just on the iPad, I was able to email my edited document directly from Pages. I was given the option of emailing it as a Pages, PDF, or Word document. I chose to send it as a Word document. If you choose to send as a Word document then please note that Pages will send it as a .doc file and not the newer .docx (this means it’s compatible with both old and new versions of Microsoft Word). I was then able to open the document later, in Word, on my MacBook Pro. Again, formatting was kept intact. I was happy.  

At the end of the day, if you know what you want to write and just want to get some no-frills writing done then the iPad will get the job done. If you’re a Microsoft Word user and am worried because there is no Microsoft Word native app for the iPad then don’t worry because Pages does a great job of opening and editing Word documents, while keeping formatting intact.

The only major issue that I had was jumping back and forth between writing and reading cited articles. On the Mac, I can do this with a quick Command-Tab keyboard combination. On the iPad, you need to press the home key, then tap on the app and then wait for it to launch (which, by the way, is very quick). But still, going from one step to three steps is a little annoying. Having said that, I can’t wait till the next OS update which will deliver multi-tasking and rid us of this slight annoyance.