Import Word Documents Into Pages on the iPad

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Creating Content On Your iPad

I use my iPad as a media consumption device (mmm, media nom nom), but I also think it can be a powerful way to create content without being limited by the size and battery life of a laptop.  [I recommend using either the wireless keyboard or the keyboard doc for easier typing though.]

With that in mind, if you’ve ever wanted to edit a Word document on your iPad, you may have discovered there’s not a simple way to import files directly into Pages. But here is a method I’ve been using.

One of the better “high-end” word processors is Pages, made by Apple.  It may not be the best one available, but it is likely the easiest one to understand if you come from a MS Word background like I did.  It’s very similar and I find it less bloated with irrelevant features, and more intuitive to use than Word.

Unfortunately, Pages has frustratingly few ways to work with existing documents and other media formats. If you want to work with existing documents, you have to resort to some arcane methods to get the docs onto your iPad and into Pages.  As they say, there’s an app for that.

My Methods

Rather than having to resort to emailing documents to yourself, we can access the file directly. I tend to use Dropbox a lot and love it. I still have yet to use up my free 2 gigabyte account and this is a perfect application for it.

Let’s say we keep a folder called Documents and store our .doc file there.  If I want to import it into Pages I first need to get it onto my iPad.

My favorite method also requires an additional app for the iPad: GoodReader. It’s only $1.00 and is probably number 2 or 3 on my most-used-app list.  The thing is great for reading PDFs and any other materials you can throw at it.

The nice feature here is that you can directly access your Dropbox account from within the GoodReader app itself.

How To Convert A Word Document To Pages

Just direct Goodreader to your file location above and select the Modify Files button, select the round button next to your file and click on the Open In… button which will appear in the panel on the right.  It will give you a couple of choices including Pages (assuming you own the app on your iPad.)

If you edited your word doc on Windows rather than Mac you may get some warnings about missing fonts, I just lived with whatever changes it made and kept going.

This should let you import Word Docs into Pages on your iPad pretty easily.

As with all technology, this could be out of date very quickly if Pages ever decides they want to support this directly, but for now it is a pretty simple solution.

What Do You Think?

Have you used your iPad for content creation for people (other than yourself)?  If so, what tools or apps have you found handy to use?

Tagged as: apps, import, Microsoft Word, Pages