Get the most out of your Apple tablet with the top 10 business apps for the roaming entrepreneur.
Some people think of the iPad as something of a toy – a basic computing slab suitable for little more than lounging on the sofa poking around at Facebook and Candy Crush. But those people would be wrong – especially since the introduction of Apple’s iPad Pro range.
A large list of critical business functions, like email, messaging and many administration tasks can be performed on the iPad with only its default apps. Add in a thing or two from the App Store and your iPad can become even more powerful.
We’ve trawled the deepest recesses of the App Store to highlight our current top 10 business apps for Apple’s tablet, whether you’ve got an iPad Air, iPad Mini or one of the Pro models. This is a collection of software which can make a real difference to your efficiency, improve your relations with customers and clients, not to mention helping you out creatively.
Try a few of them out and you might just find your iPad becoming your go-to office tool. Not that we won’t permit a little bit of Candy Crush in your downtime, of course…
This entry actually covers three different applications, Apple’s iOS versions of Keynote, Numbers and also Pages, each available absolutely FREE (or £7.99 ($9.99) each for iPads released before September 1 2013) . If you’re already used to working in the Apple environment, these streamlined tablet versions of its desktop apps will be instantly familiar.
While they’re not quite as well-equipped as their larger desktop counterparts, there’s enough here to keep you working on your essential documents without issues. It’s quite liberating to be able to dance around a spreadsheet with your fingers or generate charts on the fly, and while we’re not keen on typing large documents with the iOS keyboard, a Bluetooth keyboard is the perfect accompaniment to Pages.
Keynote could be particularly useful if you’re equipped with slightly more kit – pair it with an iPad VGA adapter and you’ll be able to hook your tablet straight up to a projector, and if you have an Apple Watch on your wrist its (simplistic) app is perfect for subtly advancing slides or activating animations.
The ying to iWork’s yang, Google Drive is the company’s online office suite (and storage locker) is well-suited to anyone already integrated with its ecosystem, which we’d have to presume is a vast majority of its potential users. Everything you create is auto-saved to Google Drive’s cloud storage, and the iOS specific apps – Docs for word processing, Sheets for spreadsheets and Slides for presentations – support all the major formats. Once you’re finished with something, you can instantly share it with anyone just by sending them the appropriate link.
We love the collaborative element of Google’s apps, which means several team members can access and work on the same document simultaneously, but the real key here is that you can also work offline, so if you’re travelling somewhere without an internet connection you won’t lose valuable work time. Everything’s automatically synchronised with Google’s servers when you next connect online.
You can store up to 15GB for free, but have to start paying after that with Google Drive pricing plans available up to a massive 10TB.
This is a fantastic idea on the face of it. Take pictures of documents with your iPad’s camera, and Genius Scan will turn them into PDFs. In practice, it’s just as effective as that simple explanation suggests. Once you’ve snapped a document, Genius Scan attempts to draw a frame around it, which you can tweak if it’s not quite bang on. Scan the document, and Genius Scan applies a transform to your photo, flattening it out and allowing you to export it as a PDF or JPG.
This is perfect for sending signed contracts on the fly, particularly if you’re not near an actual hardware scanner, and it’s a great idea for cataloguing receipts for later expense claims without having to carry an overflowing wallet.
In fact, if you’re looking to reduce any stacks of paper in your office, Genius Scan’s batch scanning function could be the perfect tool – just import all that paper, process it as you go, and have it sent right to Dropbox or OneDrive. You can even protect your PDFs for extra security.
Efficient projects are well-organised projects, and keeping all the information you need in one place is paramount. There’s a reason so many diligent individuals rely on Evernote to manage their information streams – it’s a great place to store everything from written notes to photos and web content.
Integrated sharing options and Evernote’s group notebooks make team collaboration easy, and it’s all entirely platform-agnostic, so anything you do on your iPad will automatically be reflected anywhere else you have access to the service.
We’d definitely recommend plumping for the £45 ($70) Evernote Premium annual subscription option (even despite the recent price hike) – you’ll get 10GB of uploads per month as opposed to the free version’s paltry 60MB, synchronisation to unlimited devices, the ability to attach and search PDFs and Office documents, and PDF annotation tools which come in handy more often than you might think. Once you’ve integrated Evernote into your workflow, you’ll never turn back – especially as rival services like Google Keep don’t even come close.
In the spirit of saving paper and reducing the number of things you have to lug around in your bag, here’s awesome note-taking app Penultimate. It gives you access to beautifully rendered and smooth inks, which make your quickly-jotted notes look amazing, and you get a host of papers to use them on (with more available through in-app purchases) .
As the name implies, it’s best used with the Apple Pencil or other stylus – mainly because scribbling notes with your index finger both gives comparatively poor results and looks ridiculous.
Highly useful for taking notes in meetings or for collaborative planning exercises, Penultimate is packed with features that integrate with Evernote. As long as you don’t have handwriting like a cross-eyed GP, Evernote will attempt to interpret your scrawls and make your notes searchable, and you can quickly and easily catalogue them in folders, meaning all of your projects will stay well-organised.
Apple’s preinstalled and now-removable Stocks app just isn’t quite up to the task. Replace it with the beautiful and clean Stocks Tracker app (then spend the £15.99/$15.99 on the full version upgrade) and you’ll see just what you’re missing.
It puts real-time quotes on US stocks at your fingertips, with support for just about every worldwide exchange. You can make the most of its highly customisable graphs and views to create your own personal stocks frontend, and use its custom push notifications to keep a close an eye on your portfolio.
While its abilities to track historical earnings and offer buy/sell indicators are undoubtedly useful, you might find even more inspiration in the integrated social feed, where other traders discuss the stock they find interesting and what they’re doing with it.
Every business has a host of systems, and usually these aren’t interconnected, meaning you’ll need to remember a bunch of logins and passwords for every single one.
