If you’ve never heard of iWork, you’re not alone. It’s oldest component, the Keynote presentation program, has only been around since 2003, with Pages and Numbers debuting a few years later. All iWork programs are Mac-only, which means that more than 90 percent of the computing population has never used iWork 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, Google Docs, and any other software suite that contains the holy trinity of business productivity applications: a word-processing program, a spreadsheet program, and a presentation/slideshow program.

With the tablet version of iWork, Apple transformed the point-and-click desktop version of the suite into tap-and-drag iPad software. It isn’t just a half-baked copy 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’s iWork re-engineering takes this into account, tucking your formatting, function, 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 onscreen elements—work in iWork, too.

You can buy the iWork programs in the App Store—just tap the Categories button and look in the Productivity area (circled). Apple sells each program separately for $10 apiece. This is convenient if, say, you just need to compose memos and wouldn’t know a GPA calculator 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 all well and good 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 PDF format, the lingua franca of the computer world, whose files everyone with the free Adobe Reader can open. Makes iWork all that more appealing, eh?

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, or 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 (circled below). 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 to 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 blankpage 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? 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 document 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 and returns you to the main Pages, Numbers, or Keynote screen, which has your previously created files. To open one, locate its thumbnail and then tap it.

You can also store files in “folders,” just as you can with apps on the iPad Home screen (page 8). Press and hold a thumbnail on the main screen and drag it onto another 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 the Pages templates all 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 just 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 if you want to slide the toolbar out of the way.)

A simple set of four 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 or landscape view, but you’ll only see the toolbar and other controls in portrait mode. 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 text-formatting tools to change a document’s type size, style, and even color (tap →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 the element to get a slider bar so you can resize the image in the frame, or use the blue handles to resize the image itself. Drag a selected photo around the page to reposition it. You can even delete photo boxes you don’t want.

Miss those Ctrl-Z (Undo) and Ctrl-S (Save) lifesavers? If you mess something up, don’t worry. Pages, like all the iWork programs, has a handy Undo button on the top-left corner of every screen. And it automatically saves your document every 30 seconds as you work along.

When you think of the iPad, you tend to think of shredding a game or cruising the Web, not wading deep into a spreadsheet. But if you need to get a little work done on your trusty tablet, 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 spreadsheets: a mortgage calculator, personal budget tracker, travel planner, weight-loss log, expense report, and more. 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 four icons hanging out in the top-right corner of the screen 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 on the page.

Need to edit the data the chart references? Give it the old double-tap and when the icon appears at the top of the screen, tap it and choose “Plot Rows as Series or Plot Columns as Series.”

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 iWork’s three apps.

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 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 to get you from one slide to the next—and you can apply a different transition for any slide in the presentation.

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

To animate text or images so they move on or off a slide, tap the relevant element and then tap the toolbar’s dual-diamond icon. Tap Build In (to move the item in) or Build Out (to move it off the slide), and then select an effect from the menu (shown at 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 second or two. A red laser pointer dot appears on-screen 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 the 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 document-sharing site, iWork.com. You can also copy your iWork files to your iCloud/MobileMe account or to a WebDAV server (the latter so you can work collaboratively).

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 Document (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 to the tablet, 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 whose file you want to copy to your iPad (Pages and so on), click Add, and then navigate to and highlight the file. Sync your iPad to copy the file over to it. On the iPad, tap the icon 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 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 it in iTunes, and then click the Apps tab. Once you sync up the iPad and iTunes, the file appears in the shared files list. Select it and click the “Save to” button (circled above) to copy it 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 have some trouble in iWork. If the apps have problems 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 desktop 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.

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 whisks you into Safari, where you can browse through your selected iWork app’s user guide (like the one below).

Tip

Although it’s obviously Apple’s favorite solution, iWork isn’t the only game in town for iPad users who use Microsoft Office. Other options include DataViz Documents To Go ($10) and Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite for iPad ($15). Both are available in the App Store and claim to have good compatibility with editing those inevitable Microsoft Office files that turn up on your tablet.