IF YOU’VE NEVER HEARD of iWork, you’re not alone. Its oldest component, the Keynote presentation program, has only been around since 2003, with Pages and Numbers debuting later. All iWork programs are Mac-only, which means that more than 90 percent of the computing population has never used the suite or doesn’t care because darn it, there’s new antivirus software to install!

Apple created iWork to cover much of the same ground as Microsoft Office, Corel WordPerfect Office, OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, and any other software suite that offers the holy trinity of business productivity tools: a word-processing program, a spreadsheet application, and a presentation/slideshow program.

With the tablet version of iWork, Apple transformed the point-and-click desktop suite into tap-and-drag iPad software. It isn’t just a half-baked version of an overstuffed office suite, either. Who wants a screen clogged full of toolbars, menus, and floating palettes when your screen is your workspace? Apple re-engineered iWork to take this into account, tucking formatting, feature, and design controls neatly into tappable buttons that deliver toolbars only when you need them—leaving most of the screen free and clear. And those iPad finger moves—where you zoom in on and pinch on-screen elements—work in iWork.

The mobile convenience doesn’t stop there. If you have iOS 5 or later and an iCloud account, your iPad syncs and backs up your iWork documents to iCloud.c om (Using iWork with iCloud on the Web), where you can view and download the files using your browser. If you use iWork on another device, like an iPhone, iCloud syncs the changes you make on one gadget to your others. Each iWork app asks if you want to set up iCloud syncing when you launch it for the first time (see Chapter 17 for more on iCloud). But you don’t need iCloud to make iWork work. If you don’t have (or use) an iCloud account, iWork stores your files locally.

Each iWork program is available in the App Store—on the Featured screen, tap the More button and look in the Productivity area, or search for “Apple” apps as shown here. Apple sells the programs for $10 apiece; it doesn’t offer an all-in-one “iWork suite.” But this is convenient if you just need to compose memos and wouldn’t know a base-10 calculation if it bit you—you don’t have to buy the whole suite. And if you do buy the whole suite, it’ll set you back just 30 bucks—a bargain compared to desktop suites that cost $80 or more.

Here’s the iWork lineup:

At this point, you may be thinking, “It’s great that iWork can do all this stuff, but does it really matter if nobody besides iPad and Mac owners can open these files?” Here’s the answer: iWork can export files in Microsoft Office formats (Import, Export, and Share iWork Files) and in PDF format. The latter is the lingua franca of the computer world, with files everyone can open with the free Adobe Reader program.

Who knows, with a Bluetooth keyboard and an iWork-equipped iPad, you may not be missing your laptop much when it comes to cranking on the bizware.

AS WITH ANY WORD-PROCESSING, spreadsheet, or presentation program, the first step in using one of iWork’s apps is to create or open a document so you have a place to process your words, numbers, or slides. Start by tapping open an app, say Pages, on the iPad’s Home screen. If this is your first time with the program, you land on the app’s main screen, where all the documents, spreadsheets, and presentations you create will live. (Apple organizes all the iWork apps the same way; Pages is used here as an example.)

The Pages main screen starts out fairly sparse, except for the introductory Getting Started guide. But as you create new documents, the screen fills up with pint-sized versions of your files, as shown below. Here’s how you create and manage documents so you can fill up your own app screen:

When you’re ready to create a fresh file in any of the apps, tap the icon in the top-left corner and choose Create Document. To start from scratch, choose the blank-page option. To create a specific type of document, like a résumé or that flyer for the school bake sale, flick through the template catalog and tap the page style you like.

Want to rename a file you’ve been using for awhile? Tap Documents to go to the main Pages screen, tap the document’s thumbnail, and then press the generic name underneath the preview until the Rename Document screen pops up (right). Now you can change the name to a more personalized or appropriate one (“Duck Report”). Tap the document to go back to the main Pages screen.

Want to switch to another file or start a brand-new one while you’re working on a document? Tap the Documents button in the upper-left corner of the open file. iWork saves the file you’ve been slaving over and returns you to the main Pages, Numbers, or Keynote screen, which has your previously created files. To open one, locate its thumbnail and tap it.

You can also store files in folders, just as you can with apps on the iPad Home screen (Make Home Screen App Folders). Press and hold a thumbnail on the main screen and drag it onto another thumbnail to create the folder (circled above), then drag in more files.

UNLESS YOU STARTED WITH the Zen of a blank page, you’ll notice that all the Pages templates use dummy type and stock photos as placeholders for your own text and pictures. In its simplest form, Pages lets you craft your documents by tapping the fake text and typing in your own words; the program adds new pages as you need them. Tap the corner of the template’s placeholder picture and replace it with one of your own from the Photos box that pops up.

When you tap into a text field (as opposed to a picture box), Pages displays a formatting toolbar at the top of the screen. It includes a ruler for tab stops and margins, plus buttons for things like formatting headlines, making characters boldface, and changing text alignment. (Tap the on the end to slide the toolbar out of the way.)

A simple set of three icons in the top-right corner of the screen contains all the program’s other formatting tools. With these, you can:

You can use Pages in either portrait (vertical) or landscape (horizontal) view. If you tend to do a lot of text input while carrying the iPad around in your hands, you can use the split keyboard (Use the Split Keyboard) to get your thumbs typing on either side of the screen.

Want to jump to a different page in a document? Press your finger down on the right side of the screen to see the Page Navigator preview tool, then move it up or down until you find the page you want.

Tips for Working with Text and Photos

Pages may have a ton of templates, but you’re not locked into cookie-cutter documents. If you want, you can use the text-formatting Style tools to change a document’s type size, style, and even color (tap the paint-brush icon to get to Style→Text Options→Color) to make it look the way you want it to look.

And you’re not locked into rigid photo sizes or placement, either. After you import your own pictures or choose stock graphics, tap an element to get a slider bar so you can resize the image in the frame, or use the blue handles on the image itself to resize it.

Drag a selected photo around the page to reposition it. You can even delete photos you don’t want.

Miss those Control-Z (Undo) and Control-S (Save) lifesavers? If you mess something up, don’t worry. Pages, like all the iWork programs, has a handy Undo button in the top-left corner of every screen.

WHEN YOU THINK OF the iPad, you tend to think of gaming or surfing, not wading deep into a spreadsheet. But if you need to get work done, the Numbers app can graph your data, crunch your digits, and handle other nerdy tasks.

As with Pages, Numbers offers a collection of 16 pre-fabricated templates for the most popular types of spreadsheet: a mortgage calculator, personal budget tracker, weight-loss log, expense report, and so on. There’s also a blank template with an empty grid of cells awaiting you. Tap a template to select it. Tap the fake text and numbers in the cells to overwrite them with your own facts and figures. To add new sheets or forms to a spreadsheet, tap the button on the tab at the top of the screen.

As with Pages, the three icons hanging out in the top-right corner hold the formatting tools for table text and graphics. With a tap, you can:

You can pull and push pretty much every element in a Numbers template to accommodate your data set. Need to expand the standard chart by a few rows or columns? Tap the chart and, when the gray bar appears, tap the circular handle on either the horizontal or vertical bar and drag it in the direction you need to add (or delete) rows and columns. If you don’t like the position of a table or chart in a template, tap it so the same gray adjustment bars appear. Then press the dotted circle in the top-left corner and drag the table to a new location.

To add numbers, dates, or bits of text to your spreadsheet, double-tap a cell to summon the keyboard. You can also cut, copy, and paste the content of a cell. (Need a refresher in iPad cutting and pasting? Flip to Cut, Copy, Paste, and Replace Text.)

Numbers wouldn’t be a spreadsheet program if it didn’t do sums and calculations. Double-tap any cell where you want to execute an automatic calculation, and the Numbers keypad for punching in math and logic arguments appears. It offers more than 250 formulas and functions in several mathematical specialties, including engineering and statistics, for a value-calculating good time.

IF THERE’S AN APP in the iWork trio that shows off the iPad’s looks best, it’s Keynote—it shines when your slides and snazzy animated transitions play on its high-resolution screen. Made to let you show off photos, graphics, and short bits of bullet-pointed text, Keynote is the most intuitive of iWorks’ three apps. And it’s probably the most fun to play around with.

It comes with 12 templates, some of them extremely plain for your more serious talks about how the company missed its financial goals for Q4, and some fancier for middle-school book reports and vacation photo essays. Once you pick a template, fill it up with your own pictures and text. (You have to ’Pad horizontally—Keynote doesn’t do portrait mode.)

During your presentation, you don’t have to progress statically from slide to slide. Keynote comes with several animated transitions. You can spin, twirl, pop, flip, dissolve, or zoom from one slide to the next—and you can apply a different transition for any slide in the presentation. And with the super high-resolution Retina display on the big iPad, the transitions really pop.

Keynote gives you control over the text on your slides, too, letting you add animated effects so that, for instance, your titles disappear in a hail of flash bulbs. Here’s a tour of the Keynote toolbar:

To animate text or images so they move on or off a slide, press the element until the Animate menu appears. Tap None on the menu and then tap Build In (to move an item in) or Build Out (to move it off the slide). Select an effect from the menu (right). It’s good fun.

For an even cooler way to grab your audience’s attention, press and hold your finger on a slide for a couple seconds. A red laser pointer dot appears and follows your fingertip around as you drag it to point out something…important .

SO WHAT GOOD IS all this work (and iWork) if you can’t share your files with people who need them? And what can you, as an industrious iPad owner, do with your fancy iWork suite if you can’t view, open, and edit files that people send you—especially if your correspondents cling to Microsoft Office and don’t even have iWork? No problem. Here’s why:

You can move files on and off your iPad multiple ways—by email, using iTunes, or via Apple’s iCloud site (Using iWork with iCloud on the Web). And you can copy your iWork files to a WebDAV server so you can work collaboratively with others.

iWork by Email

How do you normally get most of the files people send you? If the answer is email, you’re in luck. If you get an attached Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or .csv (comma-separated values) file, or a Numbers, Pages, or Keynote file, you can save it in the corresponding iWork for iPad program. Just press and hold the file attachment icon until the “Open in Pages” (or whatever) option pops up; if you have another app that can open the file, choose “Open In…” and select the app. Just tapping the file once opens the attachment as a Quick Look preview for reading, but not editing (though Quick Look does give you a button, in the top-right corner, to open the file in the appropriate app).

Likewise, you can export iWork files by email. Select the file and tap the toolbar’s wrench icon, tap Share and Print, and then tap Email [file type] (right). For Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, you can export iWork files in their native formats for the desktop editions of the program. You can also send documents as Office-ready .doc, .xls, or .ppt files. And finally, you can export any iWork file as a PDF document. (See the export options for Pages at right.) Tap your choice to convert (if necessary) and attach the iWork file to an outgoing message.

iWork by iTunes Sync

File too big to email? You can use iTunes’ file-sharing option to sync files back and forth between your computer and iPad. To import a file, connect your iPad, click its icon in the iTunes window, and then click the Apps tab. Scroll to the file transfer settings area at the bottom of the screen.

In the Apps column, click the icon for the program (Pages and so on) whose file you want to copy to your iPad, click Add, and then navigate to and highlight the file name. Sync your iPad to copy the file over to it. Then, on your iPad, tap on the Pages/Numbers/Keynote main screen, and then tap “Copy from iTunes.” In the box that appears (above), tap open the transferred file to import it into your chosen iWork app.

To export an open file from your iPad to iTunes (and then to a folder on your computer), tap the wrench icon in the toolbar, choose Share and Print, tap Send to iTunes, and then tap your preferred format for the exported file (like .doc or .pdf). Connect the iPad to your computer, select your tablet in iTunes, and then click the Apps tab. Scroll down past the list of apps to the File Sharing area. On the left side of the screen, click the name of the iWork app you used and then, on the right side, select the file you want to import. Click the “Save to” button (circled above) to copy the file to a folder on your computer, where you can open it in Word or whatnot.

THE DYNAMIC TRIO OF Pages, Numbers, and Keynote lets you create fairly sophisticated documents, spreadsheets, and presentations right there on your iPad. But let’s face it—until iPads rule the galaxy, most of the world is still crouched in a Microsoft Office cubicle.

While many files can go back and forth between iWork and Office perfectly fine, intricately formatted files or those that use some of Microsoft’s more complex features may give you some trouble when you import them into iWork. If an iWork app has a problem with an imported file, you see a warning box like the one below, detailing the iComplaints. Here are some of the issues to look out for:

Getting Help with iWork

Even if you’re not flinging files back and forth to and from Microsoft Office (or even the Mac version of iWork), you may still have questions about how to do things, like, say, setting tab stops or rotating objects. Thankfully, iWork’s creators anticipated your needs and wrote a tappable online user manual for each program in the suite. And it’s quite easy to get to.

When you seek answers (to iWork questions, anyway), tap the wrench icon in the upper-right corner of Pages, Numbers, or Keynote, and slide your digit down to the Help link. From there, the iPad pops open its on-screen mini-manual, where you can browse through your selected iWork app’s user guide (like the one below). And if you have questions about the desktop version of the iWork suite, Apple has a collection of video tutorials and technical support articles that may provide answers at http://www.apple.com/support/iwork.

APPLE’S IWORK APPS FOR iPad were optimized for the tablet touchscreen, but they may not be for everyone. You might, for example, need a solution that lets you use more of Microsoft Office’s features or that integrates well with a cloud-based storage service like Dropbox. The App Store has plenty of other business-oriented programs for your iPad. Just tap through Home→App Store→Categories→Business and browse away.

Until Microsoft gets around to releasing an official Office for iPad app (which has been rumored), if iWork doesn’t work for you, consider one of these: