I bought an iPad a couple of months back in replacement of my Asus Eee PC netbook which has given me more problems than I care to share here today.
Apple has never said that the iPad is there to replace a laptop of PC (or Mac), but rather that it will change the way we do things…I’m not sure I’m convinced because ultimately, I wanted to be able to do basic things on the iPad – and frankly expected it, at the price tag it is!
So, can the iPad be used to run a business? Here are my reasons why I think it can’t and can (to a limit).
No you can’t run your business from an iPad
The iPad is not a laptop or PC – sorry to state the obvious, but I don’t just mean in the look of the tablet, but in its function.
For one thing, you need to find an App to do the things that you may take for granted on your laptop – printing for example.
While you can get apps to handle the basic Word, Excel and PowerPoint tasks that you need on a day-t0-day basis, these are by no means fully able to do what you can do on laptop.
I tried to merge some cells in an Excel document using Numbers and DocstoGo and the functionality was not available. I also wanted to format the cells within a column so that telephone numbers would show the zero, but I was unable to do that.
These may seem trivial if you don’t have to use Excel all that much, but they are still tasks that I needed to perform, and was unsuccessful in doing because of the limitations of the two premium iPad Apps that are supposed to give you Microsoft Excel functionality.
Attachments were the greatest disappointment for me and I was amazed that you can’t attach email attachments in the traditional way.
So, imagine that you have created a document, and you are replying a client email and need to attach that document to the response. You can’t – not on an iPad…you have to go the long-winded route of finding the file, and then sending it – which is a pain if you have multiple attachments – and remember to copy the email address if you don’t know it off by heart!
You can’t backup to a flash drive or memory stick – the iPad does not allow you to do that. Instead, you have to use Apps like Dropbox to sync your documents to. Yes, this is great when you finally get back to your laptop and want to download and work on something you did on your iPad. But it’s just quite a long-winded route.
What I’ve also noticed is that there are a lot of free apps that promise to solve your problem (one of mine was recording podcasts), but as soon as you’ve recorded, you can’t do anything with the files until you upgrade to the premium version – so beware!
Blogging was a mundane and limiting process, too. I use WordPress mainly on my websites, and thought the iPad would help me write more. That it did – but uploading articles right here on Motherswhowork.co.uk proved difficult.
For one thing, the WordPress App is very limited – you can’t even put captions onto images unless you know html and can hard code it in.
So, I thought I would do it the old-fashioned way ad just log into the admin side of the website using the browser (Safari). Bizarrely, everything looks the same (great), but when you try to do certain things like upload an image, you can’t. However, you can browse the image archive, add a new caption and add it to the post.
So, I ended up uploading images using the App, then adding it using the browser – just so that I could add a caption, and so I could optimise images for SEO purposes.
And it’s not just WordPress that has an issue because of the Flash issue – you will find that a lot of websites that you took for granted cannot be viewed on the iPad, and for non-Flash websites that have elements of flash (for forms etc), you just won’t be able to use that functionality.
Yes, you can run your business from an iPad
If you want something that is small and portable, so you don’t have to carry around a heavy laptop when all you want to do is answer emails, be able to open and view reports and go on the internet, then yes the iPad is good for this.
The other dependency is what type of business you do. If you are a graphic designer, then I would be weary or recommending the iPad to you – although your clients may be impressed when you turn up to meetings with one…but that is not a very good reason to buy an iPad!
