Office2 HD Reviewed

If you want to start taking advantage of the cloud in your genealogy activities, you have to get Office2 HD ($8.00 on iTunes) for your iPad. This low cost product provides a full word processor and spreadsheet with built-in ability to read/write Office 2003 documents. The best part is that Office2 HD can open, edit, and save files to Google Docs, MobileMe, and Dropbox as if they were other drives on your local computer!

One of the difficulties we all have with the iPad is that each application is like an island unto itself. An app may be able to create and edit a document on the iPad, but there is no way to share it with other apps on the iPad. Thus, we are forced to email docs to ourselves and reopen them in other applications. An alternative is to sync your iPad with your desktop computer to gain access to the files from individual applications.

Now, along comes Office2 HD. It still can't get around the local file sharing, but it has the next best thing -- the capability to open cloud storage services as if they were local folders and create, edit, and delete files from these services. Why is this good? Because, using these services from another PC, laptop, Mac, etc., one can open and modify the same files outside the iPad without resorting to email or standing on your head!

You can create documents at the library with your iPad and save them directly to Google Docs or another cloud service and not worry that your day of research could be lost if the iPad is misplaced or hits the floor and shatters. That's the beauty of the cloud.

So, what are you waiting for? Get on the cloud! Open a Google Docs account or a MobileMe or a Dropbox account. Even if you don't have an iPad, the cloud works with your PC or Mac, too.

Got your iPad yet?

Just got mine, and wow, this is going to be great for genealogy research. The size of a thin book, the iPad can fit into any carry bag. It's easy to lose it in a pile of books on the table!

Couple it with a small 10 megapixel digital camera with macro and this is probably all you need for research at an archive, library, or town hall.

Believe it or not, but the touch keyboard in landscape mode is very easy to use and effective for taking notes. I've downloaded several apps from the App Store to help with this: Bento, Pages, Dropbox, Evernote, iDisk, Reunion (iPhone version only for now), and Office2 HD. The last app enables you to download, edit, create, and save .doc and .xls files using the cloud services supplied by Google, MobileMe, and Dropbox. In fact, I use Office2 HD as my primary writing tool on the iPad over the Apple Pages app because Pages cannot access the cloud. Pages stores its documents in a local folder accessible only to Pages on the iPad. If you want to use these docs in other places, you have to either email them as attachments or dock the iPad with your computer and sync them to your computer. I'm hoping Apple addresses this serious deficiency in the next release of Pages because the competition, namely Office2 HD, is way ahead of them right now.

Evernote has its own dedicated app for the iPad with limited functionality. You can create new notes and sync them back to all your other devices via WiFi or 3G. Dropbox also keeps your files in sync and allows you to download docs from the cloud to your iPad for local access.

I use Bento to maintain my source documentation and sync it between my iMac, Macbook, iPod Touch, and iPad. As I collect material, I create a source record in Bento for each referenced item. It is a fully searchable database that ensures I have all the proper information needed for creating full source references in my reports.

I've only begun to scratch the surface of what you can do with an iPad for genealogy. Future posts will dig into some of these products and methods.