A quick battle between word processors. The mighty Microsoft Word vs the too cool for School Apple Pages

There I was, miles from home, armed only with an iPad to battle against corporate deliverable overload. I needed to produce some documents that look good fast, so I took the path of least resistance and downloaded the Pages app. It worked as well as I could have hoped and I lived to fight another corporate day.

Back home on the other side of the word I emerged from Apple Land  into the cold grey January day with a new Macbook Air tucked into my coat. My usual welcome home ritual for a new mac is to connect to the old one, hit up migration assistant and go to bed to wake to a new mac full of my old stuff. As 350GB   >  120GB of the sporty Air I had no choice other than to do a selective migration. I was moving house at the time and couldn’t lay my hands on the license key for Office for Mac and instead decided to show Apple even more love by downloading Page from the app store.

So which ones best?

Both applications have a solid, practical template library to get you started. Microsoft have definitely made an effort to add some flair to their templates and with the colour scheme and font scheme selectors you have infinite creative possibilities. Apple however, remain on top form with a huge library of templates, newsletters and other creative content. Arguably, if your in the corporate world these decisions will already be made by the cool guys in Marketing, but for the small business there really is some gold to be had here.

Once you start adding content to your documents the differences between the two products quickly become obvious. Pages certainly  has a more compact, less cluttered menu although it could be argued that Word is faster as choices like Bullets / Numbers are laid out in front of you rather than accessed via a drop down selection. The Word format painter which can be a huge time saver doesn’t exist in Pages and there are other similar functions that old school Word users will miss when using this product.

These days Word has a better library of shapes and some great smart art options to create quick visuals. Word also manages the menu functions better by grouping similar tasks together under clear options (although there are so many you can get frustrated trying to find “the one”).

Which ones best is a difficult question to answer as they are both good in their own way. If you don’t have much experience in either and want a straight up word processor with some added bling then you don’t need to spend anything more than £10 on Pages – it will do everything you need. If you are a hard core document monkey cranking out tenders, specifications, proposals and the like and are not put off by cost then you probably want the extra functionality of Word (and will likely be better placed to use it).

My only problem now is which one to keep as there is not enough room for passengers on this MacBook Air and the entire Microsoft Office suite is 1.34GB.

Thanks for all the positive feedback on this post. If your still weighing up Apple vs Microsoft you need to read this post on PowerPoint vs Keynote

Apple Fan? Check some of my other Apple related posts:

How to import powerpoint presentations into Keynote on your ipad

How to sync outlook with your iPhone for GTD task management

5 great iPad business apps

Is your inbox overflowing? Is your task list weighing you down? Would you like to have ninja-like control over your life?

Me too, and whilst I can’t promised all these things I can share with you my top 5 productivity tools for the iPad.

When I started using my iPad I was blown away by the potential it offered as a business tool. I didn’t expect the keyboard to be so responsive and I didn’t expect the apps to offer such rich functionality. I am now using it regularly on business trips in lieu of my MacBook and always use it on the commute to work and on flights where space is at a premium.

I am usually managing multiple projects in many countries and try to use the GTD methodology for task management. Its not always perfect, but it does a much better job than anything I have used before. I have some fairly simple requirements for a productivity tool:

• It has to support GTD.
• It must be ubiquitous, always there and always available.
• It must provide an interface with your life both at home and work.
• You have to be able to use it on an aeroplane.
• It has to be really, really cool.

ToDo

Productivity and especially GTD based productivity needs a good task list to stay afloat. I have tried many, but always struggled to find one that would work with and sync through to my PC in the office, my iPad, iPhone and MacBook. After many experiments I started using Toodledo to provide the hub of the synchronisation and have now settled on ToDo as my go to task app. I posted instructions for synchronising Toodledo and Microsoft Exchange some time ago and have been using it happily ever since.

I have also used the Toodledo app which is great and came a close second. If you don’t have PC synchronisation to worry about and can survive in an Apple only world then look at Omni Focus, another great app really well aligned with GTD.

iBooks

This may sound like a strange choice but please bear with me. I have a huge quantity of documents to read on a regular basis. I try to use planes and trains to catch up on reading where it is harder to interrupt me. My problem was the weight of paper in my bag, and the guilt I felt using killing so many trees. I now save everything as pdf, send it to iDisk and import it into iBook (works well on both the iPad and iPhone).

iBooks also gives me search and bookmarking functionality, and of course lets me read proper books as well.

Adobe Ideas

I love mind mapping and sketching out ideas, especially to help in the creative process. There are numerous iPad apps available that do this well, but Adobe Ideas is free, simple to use and has some great functionality.

Notes

Notes is a great quick and easy app to use, it does what it says on the tin and is completely free.

iDisk / Drop Box

During my first few weeks with the iPad I felt it wouldn’t be much use as a business device until I started using iDisk to share documents from my computer. That really opened up the capabilities of the device for me, and now iDisk is the hub that brings everything else together for me.

Drop box is also a fantastic app and they both work well with the good reader for managing and viewing documents.

You may also want to look at a post I wrote on email management,

step one: Identify the PowerPoint in iDisk and select “open in” keynote.

Back in my “iPad, one week on” post I bemoaned the compatibility between Keynote and PowerPoint on the iPad, and specifically the problems I had trying to import a PowerPoint presentation. I am happy to say those issues are a thing of the past and I can now easily achieve this in a few swift clicks.

1.       From your Mac or PC upload the presentation (I use .pptx) to your storage cloud. iDisk is perfect, but there are numerous alternatives that devices that Good Reader will connect to.

2.       From your iPad located the file and download. In iDisk the .pptx presentation opens in a document viewer.

3.       Click on the open icon in the top menu and select Keynote.

4.       The PowerPoint will convert and a dialogue will advise on any issues encountered in this process.

5.       Job done, you can now edit, present and do great things with your slide deck.

Final step: After some import crunching you get to review any import issues and start presenting.

Also Read:

PowerPoint vs Keynote: Which one should you buy?

I bought my iPad on day zero from the apple store in Regent street, London. As a bit of an exercise in form and functionality I thought I would blog about the new device in my life and give you a quick rundown of the apps I have been using so far. All from the iPad, of course.

The keyboard

First and foremost I can’t tell you quite how impressed i am with the keyboard. It is accurate, fast and not at all difficult to use. I doubt I would tackle a large complex document, buy also doubt I would get my laptop out on a flight again. This blog entry was typed up using Notes, although I will probably download Pages later today.

ToDo

Very early days. I have been using the Toodledoo app for some time and found it’s functionality (especially the sync with outlook using chromatic dragon) spot on. On the iPad the app could clearly do with some work to make more use of the available real estate, however it is still good.

Appigo’s ToDo looks good and has some well integrated GTD functionality. It is synced with my Toodledoo account, and therefore outlook in my office. I am still struggling with some of the navigation, but judging by the reviews the product has had, and the fact that i can’t be arsed to look for instructions, feel it will turn out to be a keeper.

Twitterific

Just as I abandoned twitterific on the iPhone in favour of the Twitter app ( which i love) along came the iPad and all that extra space. It has to be said that iPhone apps just do not scale in any kind of satisfying way and will always be a poor relation to the iPad designs. Twitter on the iPad just wasn’t working for me, and as twitterific comes as a free download i thought it was worth a shot (i tried a tweet deck install but just couldn’t get it to run). So far, so good. It does what it says on the tin, and i couldn’t ask for more than that.

Eyewitness

This is an amazing free offering from the Guardian newspaper. An awesome picture each day together with some tips to improve your photography. The image viewing experience on the iPad is just fantastic, and this is the perfect showcase. Recommended – go and download it now.

Wired

I subscribe to the UK edition of this magazine and was excited about reviewing the digital edition. It is brilliantly put together and is an absolute pleasure to use but is it more fun than the print edition landing on my doormat . . . . . . .

Marvel

It’s been sometime since I have looked at a Marvel comic, but what a way to reconnect with them. The colours just suck you into the screen and the frame by frame scroll functionality really focuses your attention on the story.

I downloaded the free comics to review and will almost certainly add to my library over the coming weeks.

iBooks

My first foray into e-readers – (the kindle just didn’t do it for me). Lovely display and page turning experience. My children enjoyed having winnie-the-pooh read to them, especially the illustrations. In our tiny home I rarely have the pleasure of keeping books for any length of time, so this could well be a winner for me. The initial offering of books in the store was disappointing, but from memory iTunes started small. And just look at it now.

The buying experience in the store is excellent, with a really decent sample available.

Calendar, Mail, Contacts, Safari

All fantastic developments on a tried and tested theme. Brilliantly reworked for the iPad. Only one complaint – Apple, when are you going to provide a decent integrated task manager? Surely I can’t be the first to ask?

WordPress

So far, so thwarted. I thought it would be perfect if I was able to do this entire post from my iPad. I downloaded the Wordpress app, ready to go, but had a heap of problems. Firstly it only seemed to want to work if I was an admin (out came the MacBook, logged into wordpress as admin, gave myself admin privileges), then it wouldnt let me paste the text I had written in notes (ending any hope of prepairing an article on a plane for example, and posting on reaching wifi land) and finally it wouldn’t let me edit the image I was posting (I was hoping I would be able to hook into the great image editing enhancements in 2.9.2, but now way jose.

Still, pretty happy with everything else. I will work on the WP app to ensure it is not just user error, and to be fair, I could easily have logged in – I just wanted to app it!

Note: I have since tried creating posts by opening wp admin on my iPad. No luck as yet as the keyboard does not get activated (obvious i guess). Drop me a note if you have an solution.

Om my current task list is the development of some mobile apps. As part of the process I have added an iPhone to my technology collection to ensure I am familiar with the OS (OK, so I just wanted one!). Suffice to say I haven’t looked at my Blackberry since, and am now firmly attached to my iPhone.

The big problem I found was getting it to work with my current GTD implementation. The blackberry synchronised nicely with my Outlook Tasks, albeit in an uninspiring application. The native Mail and calendar apps are great on the iPhone, but there is nothing to manage tasks (surely this is a huge oversight on the part of Apple?).

Never being one to give up easily I crowd-sourced some suggestions from the Twitter GTD community and now have a nice workaround in place using Toodledoo to span devices. The following presentation explains how I did this. Drop me a line and let me know how you get on.

So as a GTD devotee, a huge Apple fan and the new owner of a shinny iPod I set out to reinvent all that is good about my GTD habits in iPod land.

A very quick search of the app store, and some great reviews led me to Omni Focus, the GTD tool for both iPad and Mac. According to it’s makers the Omni Group “The iPhone OS version of OmniFocus (winner of Best iPhone Productivity Application at the WWDC 2008 Apple Design Awards) brings powerful task management functionality to users’ fingertips. With live, automatic syncing, location-aware custom actions lists, and on-the-fly task entry with voice notes and image capture, OmniFocus for iPhone is built to enhance your busy life. Access shopping lists, agenda items for work, tasks for home, or any other lists you need, wherever you are.”

And it is indeed a great tool, and perfect for GTD. It was simple to set up my projects, brain dump into my inbox and ensure I had my contexts set and an d working well. It kept me busy on a long flight, tweaking until everything seemed just so. And then I realised why it would never work for me.

Whilst my computing preferences are very much Apple, the organisation I work for is PC through and through. My entire GTD process in the office revolves around Outlook, and specifically the Task functionality. Tasks used to sync well with My Blackberry, and although the usability of the device wasn’t the best, they were at least ubiquitous. Alas, now I have a great device, awesome usability but no synchronisation of my tasks.

I am sure this is not insurmountable, and I would be grateful if anyone could share their solutions with me. In the mean time it’s back to the hipster PDA, reliable and always available, if not a little boring.

]]> http://www.phillipjenkins.co.uk/2010/04/omni-focus-gtd-on-the-iphone/feed/ 1 http://www.phillipjenkins.co.uk/2010/01/personal-cloud/ http://www.phillipjenkins.co.uk/2010/01/personal-cloud/#comments Thu, 07 Jan 2010 12:38:31 +0000 Phil Jenkins http://www.phillipjenkins.co.uk/?p=344

My key interest in Cloud is as a business platform. That said there there are a number of personal cloud offerings out there that are worth exploring. I looked briefly at three of them and considerd if they could replace my existing PC / Mac.

Google Docs

What is it?

Create and share .doc, docx, ppt, and xls documents in an easy to use browser window. It’s very quick to use, and completly free.

Will it replace my PC?

It could, but is missing features like the format painter which I often find myself using when collaborating on projects with conent from a number of people. However, if we used a comunal google document as a shared workspace to begin with this wouldnt be a problem (and it’s 100% cheaper than Sharepoint). If your an excel blackbelt you could find yourself frustrated, but all the basics are present and correct. I recently forgot to install Office after rebuilding my Macbook and found I lived happily in google docs for weeks.

Nivio

What is it?

It feels a bit like Citrix for the masses. A small box gets you hooked up to Nivio where you get a desktop and access to a number inclusive applications (Mozilla, Gimp, Skype, etc), 10mb of storage all for £4.66 per month. An additional £3.59 per month gets you MS Office. You could question the logic in paying for MS Office when Google Docs seem to handle most WP tasks free of charge. If you use applications like Visio is currently retailing at £149.99 on Amazon, on demand access (£4.45 per month on Nivio) becomes more appealing.

Will it replace my PC?

For home users it seems like a great idea. Forget about the hassles of security updates, patches and performance. For business users it doesnt make as much sense, certainly when you consider that software and hardware costs are generally written off againsy capital expenditure. A vist to the website warns that they are currently sold out promising shipping at end september – It just doesnt say which september! Theres also a good review in the Telegraph.

Pogo Plug

What is it?

The basic idea of the Pogo Plug is to conect your hardrive to the internet using https and get access to your documents anywhere. It’s a d.i.y. version of Mac’s MobileMe service providing you with your own cloud for just $99. It is accessable though Windows explorer or your Mac finder. Theres a good review and pictures on Cult of Mac.

Will it replace my PC?

No Chance, but if you travel, or want a central server you can use between home and the office then it’s worth a look. I have been using Apple’s MobileMe service for exactly that reason and would be lost without it.

New Year. New Start. At least I’m sure that’s what I said to myself last year when I declared email bankruptcy and started again. It’s always hard to stay on top. Regardless of your job eventually “stuff” sneaks up on you, and if you’re not prepared wait you could find yourself quickly sinking under the weight.

Last Christmas I got a copy of Getting Things Done, By David Allen and set about changing the way I do things. It’s not always been easy, but things have definitely been easier since I started on the GTD path. Along the way I have found myself taking the odd wrong turning in the quest for a bigger, better productivity application that will “Do it all”. Sadly, I can’t say I have found “The one”, but there are many useful tools out there. Here’s my Top 10 so far:

One – Getting Things Done by David Allen.

This is THE book to buy if you need a strategy for getting out of your hole and getting things done. I use many of these techniques to run multi million pound projects, my wife uses them to run the house – either way they are solid, proven methods for managing multiple projects. There is a great video of David Allen a Google thats well worth watching.

Two – The Hipster PDA

One of the core tenants of GTD is the ability to capture everything floating around in your head and translate it into actionable lists. Basically a pile of index cards, at any level the hipster pda is the perfect ubiquitous capture device. Merlin Man does the concept justice on his 43 folders site.

 Three – The Filofax

The ubiquitous capture tool refined. If you can’t manage your life using a pen and paper there’s no electronic device out there that will do it for you. I have been using an A3 filofax filled with homemade GTD templates with great results. It’s smarter than the hipster pda, so if you hang out in the boardroom your unlikely to get strange looks from fellow executives.

You can remove pages and drop then straight into you inbox for action, and there probably even room for a picture of the kids / dog / wife. I don’t bother with the calendar as my Blackberry (linked to the exchange server) is the most up to date view of my ever changing schedule.

Four – Google docs

I have colleagues spread across the word and much of our work is collaborative. As the organisation we work for doesn’t have a seamless SharePoint solution in place Google doc’s gives us the ability to collaborate anywhere anytime. I’ve yet to get down and dirty with Google Wave, but I’m hoping for good things.

Five – Coloured folders and a Label Printer

Each project has a folder, each folder has a label. It sounds so simple it’s almost embarrassing to write about it, yet so few people seem to keep life that simple. Again, thanks to David Allen.

Six – Microsoft Exchange

Hmmmm, I have always been anti Microsoft, so embracing exchange was a hard move for me. I found there were a number of tasks that needed sharing around my organisation. Assigning tasks through exchange is pretty simple, and pretty robust. It also syncs well with Sharepoint, Google, etc and is easy to customise views. However, my favourite feature is the simple drag and drop (email) to create a new task. This speeds up email processing significantly and by using simple categories that match my projects allows me to get a quick output of next actions, waiting on, etc.

Seven – Remember The Milk

I used this as a task management application on the iPhone for 6 months and loved the interface, ease of use and general simplicity. Having a Blackberry and an iPhone really didn’t make sense, and the blackberry won.

 Eight – Evernote

Like so many people these days much of my time is spent on the internet, either searching for answers, reviewing solutions or looking for ideas. Bookmarking is not always ideal for me, as I am often only interested in snippets of content. I may want to combine my own images, presentations or notes with found media, or add information to stuff already out there. Evernote lets me do all of that in spades and provides good search functionality to back it all up. It’s a notebook for the digital age.

Nine – Smartphone

SPEAK TO PEOPLE. Remember that cool thing we used to do before we had “smsmailtwitterupdates” to communicate by? It doesn’t need to be that smart, but linking back to the mother ship and emailing / reviewing tasks and schedules on the move certainly makes good use of dead time.

You may also want to take pictures as an aide memoir (and send them to Evernote for indexing), catch up on the news, check trains and planes and maybe even speak to someone you care about.

Ten – Spotlight (or maybe google desktop)

I love Spotlight; it is undoubtedly one of the greatest things to come out of Apple and saves me countless wasted minutes each day trying to find missing documents, emails and applications. If you haven’t seen it ask for a demo of its general awesomeness next time you’re in an Apple retailer.

If you have any killer app’s of your own you would like to share please comment below. If I get enough suggestions I will put together a second article reviewing your suggestions.

I remember a time when email was even better than sliced bread. Suddenly all my friends and colleagues were only a second or two away, regardless of where they were in the world. I didn’t have to worry about catching the post, leaving voice mails or ever struggling to communicate with anyone again.

Cut to the present day: Your inbox is filled with spam – most of it from fellow colleagues, your cc’d of everything from ordering the milk to ordering a new server, you regularly miss important emails because your inbox in sucking the will to live out of you and you just can’t bear to go there anymore. In short email sucks.

Here are 10 things that have helped me get a grip on email maddness.

1. Start Again

Chances are you have a lot of crap in your mail box and you can’t see the wood for the trees. Create a new “ground zero” folder and drag everything into in now!

2. Abandon your folder structure

Your email has a search function. This means you don’t need some amazing, complex folder structure. Getting rid of that means you don’t need to ponder each email to decide where it belongs.

3. Create a “To Do” folder

This is just for those email that are going to take more brain power than you currently have available to answer. Make sure you empty it every day or your troubles will soon return)

4. Get an “Archive” folder

Most of the emails you receive can be deleted. You do not need to keep everything, everyone sends you. Be bold, delete the rubbish and Archive only those emails that you will definitely need again.

5. Empty your inbox regularly

I really owe Merlin Mann a huge thank you for  his “Inbox Zero” strategy. It’s simple, every time you go to your inbox process it to zero. Train yourself to answer mails quickly, and succinctly. Delete everything you don’t need and if it’s going to take more than two lines to answer drag it into “To Do” for later in the day.

6. To the point

Don’t be afraid to get straight to  the point – it’s not rude and it will be appreciated. Develop a fast, efficient style of writing and replying that gets rid of the fluff. Accept that email actually works – you don’t need to follow up every mail with another enquiring if the first was received.

7. Don’t perpetuate the madness.

Don’t forward on rubbish, jokes, spam or anything else likely to ruin the day of your colleagues.

8. CC or not CC

Please stop copying me in on everything. Be careful who you cc – is it really necessary?

9. Avoid Email conversations

Talking is for the phone (or maybe msn if you really have issues) msn  style conversations by email just don’t work.

10. Use the phone

It’s good talk to talk – we should do more of it before we forget how.