Triona's Tech Tips

Word on the street is that traditional computing is dead and the tablet is king. While you still need a computer for heavy-duty tasks, much of your everyday work can be done on an iPad.

First, some pre-planning. What do you use your computer for, and of those things, what do you want to do on the iPad? For most people the answer usually includes, at minimum, email, surfing the Web, and word processing.

You may also be interested in using social media like Facebook and Twitter from your iPad. If so, I’ve got a brand-new seminar coming in April called Social Media Marketing On The Go! that might interest you.

As an example, let’s say you want to use your iPad to access email, LinkedIn, and Facebook. You also want word processing plus a way to display business presentations on a projector and screen.

Email
Email’s a snap thanks to the iPad’s built-in Mail app. However, accessing your mail and moving your mail are two very different things. The first is easy. The second is difficult to impossible depending on how you read your mail now.

This could be a whole discussion in and of itself, but here are the basics. There are two ways to read mail. Either you read it in your Web browser (called Web mail) or you have an email program like Outlook (called an email client). With Web mail your mail lives on a server, while email programs pull your mail to your local computer. So, your mail might live on the Internet or on your computer depending on how you read it.

If you’re using Web mail you’re all set. If you’re currently pulling your mail into a program on your computer, however, you will not have access to your archived mail. If you want to keep using your email program but also check mail from the iPad you need to tell the iPad to save all your mail on the server. When you check mail from the computer everything, including the mail you already saw on the iPad, will be delivered. (This may sound familiar, because it’s exactly how Outlook works if you have more than one computer.)

It’s really easy to mess up email and have some of it going one place and the rest going another. That’s why you need to plan your email strategy. If you’re not sure, or just want a quick email account to use on the iPad, you might want to sign up for a spare Gmail or Yahoo! account to keep things separate.

Social Media
LinkedIn and Facebook have apps for the iPad, but there are tons of other options too. The nice thing about using an iPad for social media is the convenience. Have a quick update? You can just type it and send in a matter of seconds. You can also use social media dashboards to consolidate your efforts.

I’ll be talking about this more in April in conjunction with my new seminar, Social Media Marketing On The Go!

Word Processing
This is a little trickier, because the iPad doesn’t save files the way you’re used to. If all you want to do is move documents between the iPad and your computer, the easiest way is to do so via iTunes. But the process is a little counterintuitive in the same way Mountain Dew is a little caffienated.

(An aside to Apple: Seriously? You develop an incredibly easy-to-use interface (iOS) but you can’t figure out a better way to manipulate files than clunky import/export? *facepalm*)

Here’s how the process works, using Apple’s Pages word processor as the example.

1. You create a file on the iPad, or open a file you’ve created previously.
2. You work on the file.
3. You export the file to iTunes in whatever format you want (usually Pages’ native format or Word, since PDFs aren’t editable). This is the important step and the one that’s not intuitive.
4. You go into iTunes on your computer, select the iPad, then Apps, then the app that you created the file in, and click Save As to save it on your computer.

Conversely, to get a file from your computer onto the iPad:

1. In iTunes, go to the iPad, then Apps, then the app the file is in.
2. Add the file, then sync the iPad.
3. In the Pages app on the iPad, go to Documents, then hit the + to add a document. Tell it to get the document from iTunes and the one you want should be there. Again, this is the tricky step.

Not only is this process clunky, but you’ll get warnings that the file on the iPad is newer than the one in iTunes, or vice versa. And it only works with supported apps like Pages.

Presentations
The most difficult part here is not the presentation software, but hooking the iPad to a projector. You have to have the right adapter. Apple carries all sorts, the one you probably want for a standard PC projector is the VGA one but it will depend on the projector.

For your presentation app you probably want Apple’s Keynote. It’s like the Ferrari in the parking lot that makes all the Volvos look pathetic. At $20 it’s pricey but so sweet you may never want to look at PowerPoint again.

At this point you should have a nicely configured iPad that does most of what you want. As you use it, you’ll discover there are other things you just can’t live without. Fortunately, as they say, there are apps for that. If you subscribe to Tech Tips by email you’ll receive my bonus product reviews including some of the iPad apps I recommend.

Have you ditched your computer for an iPad? Share your experiences in the comments!