Pro Office for iPad: How to Be Productive with Office for iPad (2014)

Introduction

Your iPad is a fantastic device for both work and play. By adding Microsoft’s Office for iPad apps to it, you can turn it into a productivity powerhouse for creating and editing documents and spreadsheets, developing and delivering presentations, and noting down any information you want to keep.

This book shows you how to get the most out of the Office for iPad apps.

Who Is This Book For?

This book is for you—anyone who has an iPad and wants to be productive with it.

All you need to get started is your iPad and the ability to perform basic actions with it, such as navigating the Home screens and launching apps.

Some knowledge of the desktop versions of the Office apps is helpful but not essential. If you’ve used the desktop versions of the apps, you’ll be able to apply your knowledge easily to the iPad versions. But even if you’ve never used the desktop versions, you’ll be able to quickly become an expert with the iPad versions of the apps.

What Does This Book Cover?

This book contains 12 chapters that cover the four Office for iPad apps: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

Chapter 1 will make sure you know the essentials for getting going with the Office apps on your iPad. You will download, install, and activate the apps if you haven’t already done so. You will then learn essential moves such as launching apps, switching among apps, and closing apps when necessary. This chapter will also explain how to choose settings for the apps and how to reset them if problems occur.

Chapter 2 will bring you up to speed with the common tools that the apps share. You will learn to enter and format text, add graphics and shapes, use the Find and Replace tools, and print all or part of your work.

Chapter 3 will show you how to set up your OneDrive and SharePoint services on your iPad so that the Office apps can access them. You will then learn to navigate the file management screens and manage an active document from its File menu. This chapter will also explain how to share your documents with others and how to troubleshoot problems with documents.

Chapter 4 will start by giving you a short tour of the features that Word for iPad has and those it lacks compared to the desktop versions. After that, you will learn how to create new documents, how to navigate the Word interface, and how to enter and edit text in documents. Coverage will include working with tabs and line breaks, using the Paste Options feature, and displaying invisible characters, such as spaces and paragraph marks.

Chapter 5 will tell you what you need to know to format your documents effectively. You will learn how to set the page size, orientation, and margins for a document and how to apply the different types of formatting that Word provides, such as styles and direct formatting. You’ll also explore Word’s extra features for tables, its sections and newspaper-style columns, and its options for wrapping text around objects.

Chapter 6 will show you how to add headers, footers, and page numbers to your documents. You will also learn how to work with footnotes, endnotes, and comments; how to use the Track Changes feature to mark revisions in your documents and integrate input from multiple authors; and how to edit your documents simultaneously with your colleagues.

Chapter 7 will first make sure you understand the app’s features and limitations as compared with the desktop versions. You will then learn how to create a new workbook, navigate the Excel interface, enter data in a worksheet, and customize the view to suit your preferences.

Chapter 8 will explain how to build and format worksheets quickly and efficiently on your iPad. You will start by creating the structure of your workbook by inserting, deleting, and rearranging worksheets; move on to inserting and deleting rows, columns, and cells; and then set column height and row width and hide any rows or columns you don’t want people to see. After that, you will dig into formatting cells and ranges, using the Find and Replace features, and sorting and filtering your data to show the records you need. You will finish by looking at how to work with comments and how to print all or part of a workbook.

Chapter 9 will begin by making clear the difference between formulas and functions, and explaining when you use each. You will learn how to refer to cells and ranges, meet the calculation operators that Excel supports, and discover how to use them. You will also learn about common problems that occur with formulas and ways to troubleshoot them.

Chapter 10 will introduce you to Excel for iPad’s wide range of chart types and subtypes, and suggest ways of finding a suitable chart to present your data clearly and persuasively. You will learn how to create a chart, change its type and subtype as needed, switch its source data or transpose its rows and columns, and give it the layout and style that will work most effectively. You will also learn how to use your Excel charts in Word documents and PowerPoint presentations.

Chapter 11 will start by covering PowerPoint’s features and limitations, putting you in a good position to judge how to use the app most effectively. You will learn to navigate the PowerPoint interface, create a presentation, and add slides to it; how to add, delete, and rearrange the slides; and how to add transition effects to them. You will also find out how to give a presentation from your iPad, either on the iPad’s screen or on a projector or monitor connected either via a cable or via AirPlay.

Chapter 12 will get you up to speed on using OneNote for recording, storing, and manipulating information on your iPad. You will learn to navigate OneNote’s notebooks, sections, section groups, and pages; add pages and enter notes on them; and share your note pages and notebooks with others.