Last Sunday saw a scene that would warm the
heart of Apple’s PR team, if similar events didn’t take place with such
frequency and without any sign of such miracles. A friend appeared on my
doorstep on her way back from the local Apple Store, happily clutching a new
iPad and Mac mini and promising to dump Microsoft Office to run her business on
iWork.
The background to her visit was that in her
job as a meeting facilitator, she had tired of lugging a 15m MacBook Pro to out
of office meetings. She wanted to invest in something more portable, hence the
iPad, with a Mac mini for home office use. Her travelling role meant she
collaborated on a number of documents with colleagues on a mix of PC5 and Macs.
They had settled on the common currency of Microsoft Word to create documents,
which were stored in a shared Dropbox account. It seemed to work reasonably
well.
iWork,
an Office alternative for Macs
Which brought her to the point of her
visit. She was here to ask the best way to keep this setup going on the iPad.
She knew Word for the iPad didn’t exist, but had been told by Apple Store staff
that Pages on the iPad could fill the gap.
As a passionate defender of all things
iWork, normally I’d wholeheartedly agree. In this case, though, mixing Pages on
iPad, Word on PC and Dropbox could get very complicated.
As
a passionate defender of all things iWork, normally I’d wholeheartedly agree.
The first concern I raised was prefaced by
the reassurance that Pages on the iPad is, generally speaking, very good at
working with Word, even across platforms. But aside from the requirement to
export the document to Word format from Pages, there is one significant hurdle,
particularly for online collaboration: Pages for iPad doesn’t support tracking
changes. More precisely, if changes in a document have been tracked in Word,
those changes are automatically accepted when you open the document on the
iPad.
Fortunately, in this case that worry was
cheerily dismissed. The collaboration team didn’t use tracked changes, instead
marking up any new content by highlight ing the text using Word’s Highlight
tool, which does transfer to Pages on the iPad.
That
has the potential for a great collaboration environment.
It turned out the biggest problem was
collaborating via Dropbox. Dropbox may be a superb online storage service, but
it doesn’t play well with iWork on iOS. It isn’t completely incompatible: from
the Dropbox iOS app, you can open Word files stored there in Pages. The trouble
lies at the other end you can’t easily save an opened document back into
Dropbox, as there’s no option within Pages to store on Dropbox.
The only workaround, I explained, was to
use WebDAV, as iWork on iOS can store and open files on WebDAV-compatible
servers. While Dropbox itself isn’t WebDAV compatible and according to the
company, this isn’t in the product road map there are third-party services that
add WebDAV compatibility to it You sign up to the service, link it to Dropbox,
enter its WebDAV login details and you have direct access to your Dropbox
folder from iWork.
But the service I initially suggested, DropDAV,
charges a monthly subscription fee. Granted, it’s only a few pounds, but
together with the other compatibility issues, and after dismissing the
alternative suggestion of attempting to convince her colleagues to standardise
on iWork, it proved the final straw for my friend. She elected to return the
iPad and Mac mini to the Apple Store and replace them with a MacBook Air.
It was only much later my staircase wit
kicking in again that I found something that might have changed her mind: a
free WebDAV service, Otixo (otixo.com), which in many ways, is better that
Dr0pDAV. It not only works with Dropbox, but will also perform similar
functions for a clutch of other online services, including Google Drive and
Microsoft’s SkyDrive.
Once you’ve set up a free account at Otixo
and logged in, you follow its step-by-step guide to link your chosen cloud
drive to the service. On the iPad, you then open Pages. From its document
library screen, tap the Download button and choose ‘Copy from WebDAV’. In the
resulting window, enter the Otixo Server Address (https://dav.otixo.com) and
sign in with your Otixo user ID and password.
Your Dropbox folder will then be visible to
you within Pages, and you should be able to open and edit any compatible files,
such as Word documents. When you’ve finished editing the document, you can then
save it directly back to Dropbox by tapping the Spanner icon at the top right
of the document window and choosing Share and Print > Copy to WebDAV. When
presented with the choice of format (Pages, PDF or Word), choose Word. You’ll
be prompted to choose whether you want to overwrite the existing document in
the Dropbox folder. Choose Replace.
The Beauty Of the Dropbox service is that even through you’re overwriting the
existing document, Dropbox will still keep a snapshot of previous versions of
the document, so on the Dropbox website you can revert to an earlier version if
you accidentally overwrite a document.
However, while syncing using iCloud is a
near-seamless experience, working with a WebDAV server requires a more studious
approach to syncing. Each time you open a Dropbox document in Pages, Keynote or
Numbers, a copy of it is automatically added to the relevant app’s document
browser window. And when you save the document as a Word file to Dropbox, this
copy remains in the browser. So the next time you open a document from Dropbox,
the iWork app creates a second copy of it in the document browser, appending a
suffix to its filename to distinguish it from the first copy. When you save
this second file back to the Dropbox, it will naturally save it under its new
name, so leaving the original intact in your Dropbox folder. You’ll eventually
end up with several different versions of the same document in Dropbox and A
clutter of duplicates in the browser window. To avoid this, you need Dropbox B
to keep deleting the copy from the iWork document browser each time you export
the file to Dropbox. Equally, the Otixo is far from perfect. Its website can be
glacially slow, and its free version limits the amount of data you transfer
between Otixo and the synced devices to 2GB every month. If you’re regularly
syncing large files from Mac to iPad, that bandwidth can quickly be eaten up. A
saving grace is that unlimited bandwidth, at $5 per month, isn’t prohibitively
expensive.
Against that, the advantage of Otixo over
rival services is that it can access several different services in one place.
On the iPad, files stored on Google Drive and Dropbox are only a couple of taps
away, and on Otixo’s website you can copy items between services. Even better,
you can set up collaborative areas called Spaces. Drag files from different
linked online services into a single Space and you can collaborate on these
copied files with invited users. And you can access Spaces on an iPad or iPhone
as easily as you can get to your Dropbox files. That has the potential for a
great collaboration environment.
This time, I couldn’t convince my friend
that Pages for iPad was the best tool for the job, but subject to its
parsimonious bandwidth capacity, Otixo comes close to allowing Office users to
discard their laptops and use their iPad to collaborate.
