The iPad Lawyer - Documents to Go
Wednesday, June 2, 2010 at 12:58PM Developments on the iPad front are coming thick and fast... whilst I was writing yesterday's post about editing legal documents on the iPad it turns out that DataViz were launching a new version of their Documents To Go software which now works on the iPad.
Documents To Go has been available on the iPhone for a while, but the iPad release goes a long way towards addressing the concerns I have previously raised about using the iPad to edit legal documents.
The download is priced at £6.99 in the UK (continuing the trend of iPad apps being vastly more expensive than their iPhone counterparts). I have bought and installed the App and in my view it is well worth the price. You can either transfer documents across and work on them in the same way as any other App - or download the desktop version of Documents To Go which apparently allows you to keep the documents in sync between the desktop and the iPad (I haven't tested this yet).
A couple of screenshots show how big a leap this is (click on the images for the full sized versions which are more readable). The first one shows a typical legal document which I have imported from MS Word format into Pages on the iPad:-
;)
You can see that the formatting is all over the place, the numbering has gone haywire and it generally looks a complete mess. Rest assured that if you export it back into Word or email it to someone the end result won't look any better.
Here is the same document imported into Documents To Go.
;)
It basically looks exactly the same as on my desktop... and when edited and exported back it still looks exactly the same with all the underlying formatting and numbering intact.
I still wouldn't want to draft a share purchase agreement on the iPad, but this opens to door to using it to edit documents whilst I am on the road in a way which wasn't possible at the beginning of the week.
There is still one problem... even Documents To Go can't handle documents with tracked changes (as Josh at Tablet Legal has previously noted).
A lot of firms prefer to use proprietary comparison software rather than the Microsoft tracked changes system so this may not be a dealbreaker for everyone, but it is still a bit limiting.
However, based on previous performance I will probably find that by the time I post this someone will have released an App to do it!
Peninsulawyer
Update:- I have also testing the integration between Documents To Go and Dropbox and it works really nicely. Simply connect the App with your Dropbox account and you can work on documents and save the revisions back to your Dropbox (which doesn't seem to work with Pages and other Apps).
The only thing to note is that you have to exit the document once you have saved it any sync your Dropbox before it will show up.
The Documents To Go desktop method of transfer seems to require you to be connected via the same WiFi network so I don't know how useful this will be for me in the office, but the Dropbox functionality seems to cover what I need.
Reader Comments (2)
Glad to see your experience in integrating Dropbox and DTG was better than mine. If I may ask, what version of Word are you using on the desktop.
I am working on a comprehensive comparison post of what documents look like in the various word processing apps on the iPad and what they look like once exported back to the desktop. Of course, a lot depends on the styles and formatting used in a document.
Most of my iPad drafting though has been in plain text. I dash off a draft and shoot to my assistant for proper formatting. My favorite combo of apps is SimpleNote and TextExpander. TE expands text snippets into full words, paragraps or even pages of text. As I add predefined snippets to TE, my drafting proficiency on the iPad has accelerated dramatically.
Great blog. I'll be adding to my blogroll. Look forward to reading about your experiences.
Thanks Josh. I am using Word 2003 and it seems to integrate fine with Dropbox and D2Go. No helpful tips to share unfortunately as I basically just fired it up and it worked!