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.