Is the iPad an office?

Sadly no the iPad is not up to office applications. Why?

Because many things we do everyday involve accessing files made across different applications, but on the iPad the files for each application are "sandboxed" to that app. The exceptions to this are when an app specifically generates a file and gives it to another app - the most common application of this is Photo attaching to an email, or Pages generating a PDF and attaching to a mail.

But this is not the way people send emails, they generally write them first then decide to attach something, or many things.

Example

I generate and mail out Press Releases for various organisations. For this I use Contacts to keep the email addresses, I identify each contacts by putting a keyword in the "Company" field, then on the iMac I can create "Smartgroups" and Mail to them text and attached PDF files.

But this can't be done on the iPad for two reasons, first is that the iPad Contacts app does not sync or generate Smartgroups, so I can't mail to a group through the Mail program. Second the iPad does not let you generate an email then attach a file.

Solution

The solution is complex and mind dumbing. It uses an app called GroupMail which lets you create Smartgroups, but does not put them in your Contacts app because it can't get in the sandbox… first fail. So what we have to do is this:

1 Make a Smartgroup in Groupmail, by defining a rule to extract all people with a specific key in their card.

2 Open Pages, chose edit > chose doc (wobbles) > chose create email, chose PDF option. This creates an email in a Mail app window with the PDF attached. But it does not have the email distribution list in To or cc or Bcc. Now go to Mail, open the Draft and Select All in the email message - i.e. the PDF file attached. 4 Back in Groupmail select your group, set the To, cc & Bcc, then create email, enter subject. Paste in the PDF file attachment from 2

5 Return to Pages, open the doc, select all the text and copy

6 Go back to Groupmail and paste in the text in the email you made here, edit it and send the text and the attached PDF file… whew



Can you believe this seems to be the only way!!!

So what should happen?

Mail should have an attach button that allows you to grab any file from another app, be it Pages, Keynote or any file in Dropbox, and attach it. problem solved!