Was I wrong to recommend an iPad.

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When my brother-in-law came over here from Uruguay he was using an ancient laptop and a pretty cr***y tablet. Since he went home I've bought an iPad too. Having used Open Office on my iMac for some time, I assumed that the iPad could use it too.

I've downloaded Googledrive but that doesn't recognise .ods documents. I read online that IBM Symphony would recognise most 'Office' applications but the .dmg file I downloaded won't open on iPad.

If I download Pages, Numbers and Keypoint will it recognise their Open Office equivalents?
 

bobtomay

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"Assumed" is the key here. Oo_Org at this point in time has made it pretty clear they have no interest in porting OO to any of the tablet OSs. At around 200 million tablets in use at this time, and growing by over 100 million a year now, not sure what it's going to take for them to get their noses out of the air.

The iPad does not run OS X. It runs iOS. You cannot install any OS X app on an iPad, iPhone, iPod the same as you cannot install a Windows app in OS X (unless you're running Crossover, Parallels, etc.). Nor can you install any Windows app on an Android tablet.

The iWork suite for the iPad cannot open odf file types. It can open MS Office files. While I use OO or Libre at home (and have for many years), have never saved any documents in their odf formats since it's really only slightly more popular than... uhm... Linux.

As far as I am aware, all of the apps that work with odf files are web based and convert them for download to iDevices.
Not used any of them myself - but we should have someone here that could recommend one.
 
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"Assumed" is the key here. Oo_Org at this point in time has made it pretty clear they have no interest in porting OO to any of the tablet OSs. At around 200 million tablets in use at this time, and growing by over 100 million a year now, not sure what it's going to take for them to get their noses out of the air.

The iPad does not run OS X. It runs iOS. You cannot install any OS X app on an iPad, iPhone, iPod the same as you cannot install a Windows app in OS X (unless you're running Crossover, Parallels, etc.). Nor can you install any Windows app on an Android tablet.

The iWork suite for the iPad cannot open odf file types. It can open MS Office files. While I use OO or Libre at home (and have for many years), have never saved any documents in their odf formats since it's really only slightly more popular than... uhm... Linux.

As far as I am aware, all of the apps that work with odf files are web based and convert them for download to iDevices.
Not used any of them myself - but we should have someone here that could recommend one.


Since starting this thread I have found an app called rollapp which will open an OO file from googledocs. As I haven't yet discovered how to access the virtual keyboard in this app and you need it to be connected to the internet to make it work this may not be the best solution.
 
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LIbre office are working on a port to Android and iOS, but it isn't ready yet, so the lack of open office type apps is not limited to iOS, its an Android issue too, but with the growing use of tablets, its becoming a platform nobody can ignore any longer
 

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I've downloaded Googledrive but that doesn't recognise .ods documents.
The Google Drive app won't do anything with the file but you can use the web interface to convert files (and it supports odt documents so I'm going to guess that it supports ods files as well). You can set it to autoconvert or simply right click the file and choose the convert option. Once that's done, enjoy OS X, Android and iOS support.
 

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