You love your iPad, and chances are good that you need to use Microsoft Office for work. You have lots of options for editing documents created in Microsoft Word and Excel on your iPad, but what about the third major component of Microsoft Office, PowerPoint?
If you need only view a PowerPoint document, you can use almost any iOS app that displays documents (including Apples Mail and Safari). iOS can natively display, though not edit, PowerPoint (.ppt and .pptx) documents but it shows them as a continuous scroll rather than as individual slides. You also wont be able to see any animations, builds, transitions, or other special features. For displaying an existing PowerPoint presentation, a better choice is the free SlideShark app, which preserves most major PowerPoint features but still doesnt allow editing.
When you need to edit a PowerPoint presentation or create a new one from scratch, your alternatives fall into three main categories: Keynote, a third-party office suite, or a virtual copy of PowerPoint for Windows.
Use Keynote
Apples $10 Keynote for iOS () is a fine tool for creating, editing, and displaying presentations. This version doesnt have all the features of the desktop version of Keynote (), and if you import a presentation (whether created in Keynote on OS X or in PowerPoint), you may lose some important content. Say good-bye to fonts, transitions, and builds that arent available on the iPad, as well as audio and more. Even so, using Keynote is arguably the best way to edit a PowerPoint presentation on an iPad, because the app offers more powerful editing tools than any other native iPad presentation app does, and it has a better touchscreen interface than a virtual copy of Microsoft PowerPoint.
However, if you need to move a presentation back and forth between an iPad and a Mac or PC, where youll edit it using PowerPoint, Keynotes failure to preserve formatting may be a deal-breaker.
Use an office suite
The next option is to use an Office-compatible office-suite app. Five major contenders are available at the moment, and each offers at least minimal PowerPoint editing capabilities. All let you insert, duplicate, delete, and (with one exception) rearrange slides from imported PowerPoint presentations. And they all can play presentations, although without any builds, transitions, or animations.
Documents To Go Premium: DataVizs $17 Documents To Go Premium lets you edit only the text of imported PowerPoint presentations (including presenter notes); you cant alter formatting, layout, graphics, or any other visual attributes.
Office2 HD: Byte Squareds $8 Office2 HD lets you change text, formatting, and alignmentbut bizarrely for a presentation tool, it offers neither bulleted nor numbered lists. You can add shapes and graphics, change the front-to-back arrangement of elements on a slide, and set a slides background to an image or a solid color. (The $6 Slide2 HD, from the same developer, includes only the presentation features of Office2 HD.)
Polaris Office: Infrawares $13 Polaris Office offers fairly extensive graphics, formatting, and arrangement tools, but like Office2 HD it lacks an automated way to create bulleted or numbered lists (although imported lists appear correctly), and like Picsel's Smart Office 2, it renders some fonts oddly. Although I could easily add, duplicate, or delete slides, I could find no way to rearrange them.
Quickoffice Pro HD: Quickoffices $20 Quickoffice Pro HD () lets you modify text attributes (including bulleted lists), add images and shapes, and rearrange visual elements, but it doesnt give you a way to change a slides background.
Smart Office 2: Picsels $10 Smart Office 2 provides editing capabilities similar to those of Quickoffice Pro HD, but rendered some fonts oddly in my testing.
All these apps are supposed to be able to edit PowerPoint documents without losing formatting. That is, even though the apps dont support all of PowerPoints features, when you send the documents back to your Mac or PC, the documents retain the formatting they had when you imported them. However, I had mixed results with Smart Office 2; some PowerPoint documents I modified and saved to Dropbox didnt open on my Mac at all. Quickoffice is my favorite of these appsbut depending on what you need to do, your mileage may vary.
Use a virtual PowerPoint for Windows
If youre unsatisfied with the degree of PowerPoint compatibility that the foregoing iPad apps offer, how about using Microsoft PowerPoint itself? Although Microsoft hasnt yet seen fit to release an iPad version of its Office programs, several other apps let you connect to virtual Windows servers in the cloudmeaning you can use the full version of PowerPoint for Windows right on your iPad. Apps in this category include CloudOn, Nivio, and OnLive Desktop. See Run Office on your iPad for more details on each of them.
Another option in this general category is Xform Computings $25 AlwaysOnPC Personal Cloud Desktop. Instead of presenting you with a virtual Windows desktop, it uses Linux, and instead of Microsoft Office, you get OpenOffice.org (an open-source, Microsoft Office-compatible office suite).
