It’s not a question of whether you can get real work done on an iPad. After doing so ourselves, and talking to readers who do likewise, we know that it’s already happening—the real question is how to get the most out of it. That’s why we’re proud to unveil our second iPad-only iBooks Author book, the iPad Office, now available on the iBookstore for just $3.99.

In this extended Macworld feature, we’ve packed in how-tos for writing, editing spreadsheets, creating presentations, and—yes—even using Microsoft Office from your iPad and iPad mini. We also have suggestions on how to best manage your files, access cloud services, print documents, and attend meetings from afar. And don’t miss out on our in-depth buying guide for finding the perfect external iPad keyboard.

To close out this extended feature, we have opinion pieces from senior writer Lex Friedman, editorial director Jason Snell, and senior editor Dan Moren. Follow Dan’s three-day iPad-only journey, let Jason tell you why he loves writing on an iPad, and read about Lex’s iPad writing experiences.

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Google and Microsoft both return to iOS with upgraded apps designed to help you get your work done and save your most important files to the cloud. Plus, games, poems, and skeletons in this week's roundup.

Microsoft has quietly raised prices of Office for the Mac as much as 17 percent and stopped selling multi-license packages of the application suite.

The move puts Office for Mac 2011 on the same pricing schedule as the new Office 2013 for Windows. The price increases and the disappearance of the multi-license bundles also makes Microsoft’s Office 365, a software-by-subscription deal the company has aggressively pushed, more competitive with traditional “perpetual” licenses.

It’s not clear when Microsoft raised prices. The oldest search engine cache Computerworld found with the new prices was Feb. 2, so the company boosted them before then, likely on Jan. 29, the day it launched Office 2013 and Office 365 Home Premium. Microsoft did not mention the changes to Office for Mac in its press releases that day, or otherwise publicize the move on its Mac-specific website.

The single-license Office for Mac Home & Student now costs $140, a 17 percent increase from the previous price of $120. Office for Mac Home & Business, an edition that adds the Outlook email client to Home & Student’s Excel, PowerPoint and Word, runs $220, or 10 percent higher than the older $200 price.

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Mac users who’ve felt locked into the much-maligned Quicken Essentials now have another alternative: On Tuesday, developer IGG Software announced that the latest update to its Mac-only app iBank app can import documents from Intuit’s software.

It’s a popular request, according to IGG. “For nearly three years, Quicken Essentials for Mac has frustrated anyone hoping to switch to iBank 4,” IGG President Ian Gillespie said in the company’s announcement, “particularly because of its inability to export customers’ personal finance data to a standard format.”

While Quicken Essentials does allow users to export their data into a comma-separated values file (CSV), the results can be less than useful when it comes to importing that data into another application. Otherwise, the program exports only into Quicken’s own QXF format, which is used for moving files between different versions of Quicken.

Intuit has gotten a lot of flak over the years for its poor support for the Mac platform. Since Apple removed Rosetta—the part of the OS that enabled you to run PowerPC apps—in Lion, the older version of Quicken no longer worked with current releases of Mac OS X. Quicken Essentials was the company’s attempt to release an updated version of the software, but it met with much criticism over its reduced feature set.

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Just two months after its bookkeeping software arrived on the iPhone, FreshBooks has unveiled the iPad version of its accounting app.

The iPad-compatible app officially launched Thursday morning in the App Store. Like the company’s other offerings, FreshBooks lets bookkeepers and accountants manage expenses, track time on projects, and make online payments. Users can attach images of receipts to the digital invoices, making it easier to track and pay reimbursements within an organization.

Users will need a FreshBooks account to run the app, but signing up will allow them to use the cloud-based service across multiple platforms, including desktop computers. (Basic accounts are free; the lowest-rate $20-a-month paid account lets users manage up to 25 clients.)

The app is useful even if you’re not in range of Wi-Fi or cellular data connection: Users can work on accounts offline; the app will sync when an Internet connection is restored.

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Adobe is shipping Acrobat XI, a new version of its cross-platform PDF authoring and viewing software, featuring augmented tools for cloud services such as online forms and digital signatures.

Acrobat XI’s features are designed to make it easier to edit PDF documents and export them to Microsoft Office applications. The new version also offers across-the-board touch-based tablet capabilities.

A newly designed Edit Text and Images tool lets you edit text directly, automatically wrap paragraph text, search and replace words, and crop, adjust, or replace images in a PDF document. The new version also lets you resize and rotate images, and add links, bookmarks, forms, objects, files, and edit tables.

You can export PDFs from Acrobat to Microsoft PowerPoint or Word, RTF, or XML spreadsheet formats. The program also offers options for saving and retrieving content via Acrobat.com, Office 365, or SharePoint.

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We live in an increasingly paperless world, but just try to get someone's signature without one or more sheets of letter-size stock. Whether you need to collect signatures or fork over yours, it usually means dealing with printed matter.

Or maybe not, if you sign up for HelloSign. This service and its companion app for iOS make it surprisingly easy to sign and send documents electronically. Best of all, it's free.

To get started, you simply sign up for an account (or save the hassle and sign in using an existing Google account), then upload an image file containing your signature -- or draw one via a browser-based tool.

After that quick initial setup, you can install the HelloSign app on your iDevice, then sign in with the same credentials. (Actually, you can bypass the Web portion entirely and set up your account right inside the app.)

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Few know how exactly it will work, but iOS device owners and businesses will soon get the chance to jump on board with Passbook. The new feature debuts this week, when Apple releases its iOS 6 update on Wednesday.

First introduced as part of Apple’s iOS 6 preview during June’s Worldwide Developers conference, Passbook stores boarding passes, movie tickets, coupons, and gift cards on your smartphone and acts as a digital wallet of sorts. Apple touts Passbook as being location-aware—that gift card will appear on your iPhone’s lock screen when you walk into a store, for example—and as a one-stop storage space for the kind of digital data you’d normally stuff into a wallet.

What Apple hasn’t done is provide much in the way of specifics about how Passbook will work. Last week’s press event to introduce the iPhone 5 merely recapped what the company had already said about Passbook back in June and on its website.

Still, app developers, airlines and entertainment executives are leading the charge to Passbook adoption. Last week, for example, ticketing website Accesso announced integration with Passbook for theme parks and attractions that use the platform. Ticket-buyers will be able to import passes to some of the company’s clients, which include 11 Cedar Fair Entertainment theme parks across the country and the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, into Passbook.

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"We really focused on the Mac experience," said Kimberly Gehant, Intuit's group product manager of QuickBooks for Mac, during a product demonstration. "The demographics are different for Mac users. Businesses using QuickBooks tend to be more service-based, and have fewer employees than [Windows-based] businesses."

Key to the new version of QuickBooks is the integration of the Intuit Payment Network, which has been available in the Windows version of QuickBooks. Invoices made in QuickBooks 2013 give customers the option of paying through the Intuit Payment Network. Intuit charges a 50-cent flat fee for bank payments to the biller, regardless of the amount of money involved in the transaction. If the biller decides to accept credit card payments, the biller must pay a percentage of the invoiced amount instead of the 50-cent fee. Once the bank receives a payment through the Intuit Payment Network, it notifies QuickBooks 2013, which marks the appropriate invoice is marked as paid.

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This week, Apple announced an announcement, Amazon unveiled a Kindle armada, and we covered a virtual metric ton of Mac and iOS apps (assuming metric tons can be virtual, which is an open question).

Perhaps the biggest Apple news of the week concerned something that hasn’t even happened yet: The company announced an event on September 12, at which it will unveil an iPhone 5. Or execute five people. Or celebrate someone’s fifth birthday. Whatever it is, we’re pretty certain the event involves a five. In truth, we made a slew of predictions about what Tim Cook and company might announce next week, and we podcasted some, too.

From TechHive

Amazon unveiled four new Kindle Fires and new Kindles, too. Because Kindles and Kindle Fires are different things. Because that’s not at all confusing.

Fact: There are two 8.9-inch models of Kindle Fire, and only one of them has 8.9 in its name.

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Samsung gets a talking to from the bench, almost two-thirds of the App Store’s software might be silent (but not deadly), and there’s more chatter about a new iPhone dock-connector port. The remainders for Wednesday, August 1, 2012 are too talkative by half.

Samsung angers judge by sending rejected evidence from Apple trial to the media (The Verge)

Despite a ruling that some of Samsung’s proposed evidence was inadmissible, the South Korea-based firm released the info to the press anyway, earning the company a frowny face from Judge Lucy Koh. Wait until she hears about that non-refundable skywriter Samsung hired.

iWork apps now offered as pre-install option for Macs on Apple Store (9to5Mac)

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OS X got a big update Wednesday morning in the form of Mountain Lion, including support for Documents in the Cloud, Apple’s iCloud service for wirelessly syncing your files between computers. Not to be left in the dust by the likes of TextEdit and Preview, however, the Mac versions of Apple’s three iWork apps also received updates to enable access to files stored in iCloud.

It’s hardly a surprise to see iWork Update 9.2 now: Apple previewed Documents in the Cloud support for iWork at the last month’s Worldwide Developers Conference; the company had also been showcasing a screenshot of Pages synced across all Apple devices on its OS X website. As the iWork apps aren’t bundled with OS X, however, they wouldn’t receive Documents in the Cloud support as part of an operating system upgrade—hence, the separate update on Wednesday.

The patch brings support for Documents in the Cloud to Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Unfortunately, iBooks Author, the unofficial fourth member of the iWork team, did not receive a Documents in the Cloud-centric update.

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NCR Corp., which has been making cash registers for nearly 130 years, this week announced the launch of NCR Silver, a new service that lets merchants ring up sales on iPads and iPhones, then track and analyze their sales data at the end of the day.

The company joins a growing field of iOS-based “point-of-sale” products in a field pioneered largely by Square, but which also includes competitors like PayPal, Sail Payments and Intuit’s GoPayment.

Like those services, NCR is providing merchants with a free app to use in processing and tracking payments from customers. NCR, however, appears to be leaning heavily on hardware in its business model: The company doesn’t provide a free card reader to its customers—instead it charges merchants $79 for a basic credit-card reader, or $549 for a device that scans barcodes and reads credit cards. It also sells an “iPad register bundle”—including a card reader, cash drawer, and receipt printer—for $619.

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On Monday Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled the next versions of Microsoft Office for Windows. Versions? Yes, Microsoft is issuing two flavors of Office—Office 2013 and Office 365. Office 2013 is distributed and used very much like past versions of Microsoft’s ubiquitous software suite—you pay once for a single license and install it on your Windows PC. Office 365 is a subscription version, with varying monthly costs depending on the number of licenses purchased and options desired.

Saying that Office 365 will be Microsoft’s primary focus for the productivity suite, Office comes in at least three cloud versions, each of which include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, and Access. A Home Premium version will include 20GB of cloud storage with SkyDrive—Microsoft’s online storage service similar to Apple’s iCloud—as well as 60 minutes of Skype service per month. The version’s license allows access from up to five devices.

But what does this mean for the future of Office for Mac and iOS users? Macworld has learned that when the new Office launches, Microsoft will deliver an update to Office for Mac 2011. With this update, Office for Mac licenses can count as part of an Office 365 Home Premium subscription, making it possible to access your Office documents in the cloud.

Those using iOS devices will also have access to these online applications. Office Mobile will work with Windows Phones, Android phones, and iOS devices. Details weren’t forthcoming on Monday, but Microsoft will likely have more to say about Office Mobile within the next year. The company had no comment on when we might expect a Mac equivalent of Office 2013.

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Office has been a wildly successful product for Microsoft, but its continued dominance is far from assured as software moves to the cloud and employees bring their own tablets and smartphones into work.

On Monday, when Microsoft is expected to unwrap the next Windows version of Office at a press event headlined by CEO Steve Ballmer, it will become clearer whether the company is propelling the suite forward for continued success or setting it up for failure.

The impact of the latter on Microsoft as a whole would be catastrophic, since the ubiquitous suite of productivity applications is one the biggest profit engines for the company.

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With the 2012 election campaign heating up, Square on Friday added a new feature to its iOS-based card-reading system: The ability to make and collect campaign donations.

Square CEO Jack Dorsey announced the new feature via Twitter, touting it as compliant with federal fundraising laws enforced by the Federal Election Commission. Using the card-reading device that attaches to an iPhone or iPad, candidate can accept on-the-spot donation at rallies and appearances—and Square’s new fund-raising feature allows campaigns to collect FEC-required information on a donor’s name, address, occupation, and employer.

The collected funds would be available for a campaign to spend the next day, the company said in a press release.

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When you want to share a document, saving it in Adobe’s portable document format almost always guarantees that the person on the other end will see what you intend. But how do you protect what you share? You can encrypt your PDFs so that others can't copy your text or images, or even print the document. Here's how to do it using only OS X's built-in tools.

Download Macworld Video #194

• Format: MPEG-4/H.264

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This week, Macworld offered some advice, a slew of reviews, and a look back at five years of iPhone. Let’s dive in.

The explainer

We like explaining things. So this week, we explained precisely what green can do for you. We offered up three quick browser tips. If you expect that last one to include advice like “eat lots of mushrooms” and “try using fireballs,” you misread; these are not quick Bowser tips.

Other advice we shared included how to choose a to-do manager, how to present with the iPad, how to turn photos into a movie, and how to prepare for this weekend’s final farewell to MobileMe. And this week’s Macworld video tip showed you how to set up your Mac for remote file access, or SUYMFRFA for short.

Want to understand why Google’s so laser-focused on getting its apps (like Chrome and Google Drive) on iOS? We have that answer as well.

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The growth of iOS credit card readers has made it increasingly possible for merchants to get paid for sales they’ve just made. Now a new app aims to help iPad-wielding salespeople increase their in-store sales.

LightSpeed for iPad was unveiled Wednesday by Xsilva Systems. It’s similar to Square Register, the iPad app that lets small merchants track inventory, ring up sales, and take credit cards for payment—but with a couple of key differences.

Most notably, the app encourages “upselling” with a feature that shows products related to the one being purchased by the customer. A salesperson can use the iPad to show a customer jewelry and accessories that go with the dress she just chose—without having to walk to different parts of the store to view those items. (See this video for a demonstration.)

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FileMaker on Tuesday released the newest version of its consumer database, Bento 4 for iPad. Past versions of the Bento for iPad have limited creation tools and have focused on acting as a means to access and modify existing databases that were initially created on the Mac. The new Bento 4 for iPad adds a complete set of tools to allow for the creation of Bento databases on the iPad itself.

“You don’t need a Mac,” Ryan Rosenberg, FileMaker’s vice president of marketing and services, told Macworld. “You’re actually building and constructing your own apps on the iPad.”

In fact, during a demonstration of Bento 4 for iPad, FileMaker representatives consistently called individual Bento databases “apps.” Bento databases are still accessed through the Bento app, they don’t appear individually on the iOS Home screen. FileMaker has decided to call a Bento database an app, since the concept of apps is familiar to all iOS users, even though a Bento database isn’t an app in a traditional sense. “Functionally, [Bento databases] are the exact same thing as apps,” said Rosenberg.

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If you’ve ever tried to share an iWork file between Macs and iOS devices via iCloud, you know that it doesn’t work very well. The essential problem, as I’ve detailed previously, is that iWork documents on the two platforms use different file formats. This means that when you edit an iWork document on one platform (an iPhone, for example), the matching document on the other platform (a Mac, in this example) is not automatically updated to reflect the change. There is no true syncing of iWork documents between platforms.

Exciting news! This is all about to change…for the better. At Monday’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, Apple vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi revealed a new feature of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: iWork automatic syncing via Documents in the Cloud.

Surprisingly, aside from the Keynote demo, Apple has barely mentioned this coming change. The tech media have similarly not given the new feature the attention I believe it deserves. So here I am to correct this oversight.

In Mountain Lion, you will be able to live update an iWork document across platforms. That is, not only will there be automatic syncing of files, but the syncing can take place even if the same file is simultaneously open on more than one device. About 50 minutes into the keynote, Federighi showed this new feature in action: After editing a Pages document on an iPhone, the same document, already open on a Mac, updated itself on the Mac’s display. Very slick!

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Microsoft raises the alarm on Macs’ vulnerability to malware (sort of); Apple at last acknowledges where it got its maps; and just like average Joes, CEOs like to … exaggerate on their résumés. The remainders for Friday, May 4, 2012 are totally fluent in French. Nous promettons.

Microsoft: Macs ‘not safe from malware, attacks will increase’ (ZDNet)

Macs are vulnerable to malware, says Microsoft! And Microsoft should know, because the particular security flaw it’s using to illustrate this point is from Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac. So, uh. Yeah.

Welcome, Apple! (OpenStreetMap Foundation)

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Microsoft last Friday pulled a major update for Office for Mac 2011 from its upgrade servers, acknowledging bugs that have corrupted the Outlook database on some machines.

Office for Mac 2011 Service Pack 2 (SP2) was released April 12. That same day, users who had upgraded began reporting problems on Microsoft’s support site, saying that they were unable to run Outlook, the suite’s email client.

Last Tuesday, Microsoft confirmed that the SP2 upgrade could in some cases corrupt the Outlook identity database, and offered workarounds to prevent that from happening for those who had not yet installed the service pack, as well as a step-by-step guide to reconstructing the database for those affected by the bug.

Three days later, Microsoft took more drastic action, shutting down the delivery of Office for Mac 2011 SP2 through the company’s automatic upgrade service.

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There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and apparently there’s no such thing as a free preview of paid Apple software, either. As noted by MacStories, Apple has removed the trial versions of Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and Aperture from its website, instead directing customers to the Mac App Store to purchase those titles.

Where Apple once offered the free iWork downloads, the company’s website now says, “The trial version of iWork is no longer supported. But you can easily purchase Keynote, Pages, and Numbers from the Mac App Store.” The Aperture trial page sports a similar message, along with a warning that you must delete the free trial version before you can install the full version from the Mac App Store.

The apps are indeed available on the Mac App Store—and for less than they ever cost in their boxed retail versions: You can get all three iWork apps for $60, where the boxed version used to sell for $79; Aperture costs just $80 in the Mac App Store, where the box used to cost $199. But “cheaper than before” isn’t the same as a free trial, of course.

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Bare Bones Software on Tuesday released TextWrangler 4.0, a significant upgrade to the free, pared-down alternative to the company’s flagship BBEdit ( ) text editor.

After each major BBEdit upgrade—version 10 and 10.1 arrived late last year—Bare Bones brings its major interface improvements back to TextWrangler; that’s what Tuesday’s release is all about. The updated app better embraces Lion, streamlines preferences, revamps the editing window, and introduces a slew of other new features, to boot. (See our review of TextWrangler 3.5.3.)

In better embracing Lion, TextWrangler 4 now supports options like full-screen mode and the option to resize your windows from any edge.

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Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from CIO.com. Visit CIO’s Macs in the Enterprise page.

Three IT workers with iPads gathered around a whiteboard in a conference room in Boston to figure out how to improve a long-standing technical service—and running into more questions than answers.

It would have been the beginning of an arduous process that included drafting inadequate original business requirements and technical design documents, circulating them to employees inside the operations groups around the world for comment and review, making revisions, and re-circulating improved documents.

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Earlier this year, I reviewed Marked, a standout utility for previewing HTML- Markdown-, and MultiMarkdown-formatted files. Take a file you’re working on and open it in Marked, and the app shows you exactly what that document will look like when rendered as HTML in a Web browser—and that preview is updated in real time as you edit the document.

I tested Marked for a few months before writing that review, and it ended up becoming a utility that I use every day and an essential part of my workflow. Like many people who write for the Web, I use publishing tools—Macworld’s content-management system, Calepin, and a couple others—that don’t make it easy to see what your code will look like when published. Either they offer no live previews, or (in the case of the Macworld CMS), they require you to make changes, save those changes, and then reload a preview.

With Marked, the process is much simpler: Whenever I’m editing an article or document destined for Web publication, I just open that file in Marked. I’ve now got a preview of my document that’s instantly updated whenever I save changes in my editor. (I do most of my writing in BBEdit, and I’ve even got a BBEdit script that opens the current document in Marked.) The fact that Marked previews both Markdown and HTML code means that it works with both of the Web-authoring languages I use, when writing and editing, every day.

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Any 5-year-old child can name the standard tools of the trade on a construction site—hammers, saws, drills, and the like. But now you can add the iPad to the list. Thanks to a recently released app, builders and architects could replace reams of heavy, expensive paper blueprints with an Apple tablet.

“We were outraged at how much blueprints cost,” says Tracy Young, co-founder of PlanGrid.com. “For every $1 million spent on construction, $3,500 was spent on paper blueprints.” And those costs increase whenever architects and managers make changes in the middle of a project. Blueprints “get changed so fast, for a variety of reasons—things like code changes. We were constantly trying to push paper, but we couldn’t do it fast enough.”

That’s why Young and her partners created the PlanGrid app. It lets users view blueprints, add notes and amendments to those plans, and share those changes via the cloud—all without spending extra money to reprint thick reams of paper.

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No matter what device you’re using to access a database, FileMaker wants the finished product to look good. And so the latest update to the software maker’s flagship database product puts an emphasis on design features regardless of which platform you’re using.

The new FileMaker 12 lineup unveiled Wednesday updates the company’s Mac and Windows database offerings while introducing new free apps for the iPhone and iPad. Chief among the changes are additions specifically aimed at helping FileMaker users build eye-catching databases that move seamlessly from desktop to mobile device.

“People want databases that look good, work well, and are really well-organized,” Ryan Rosenberg, FileMaker’s vice president of marketing and services, told Macworld.

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Security researchers have encountered new email-based targeted attacks that exploit a vulnerability in Microsoft Office to install a remote access Trojan horse program on Mac OS systems.

The rogue emails appear to target Tibetan activist organizations and distribute booby-trapped Microsoft Word documents that exploit a known remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft Office for Mac, according to malware experts from security firm AlienVault.

“This is one of the few times that we have seen a malicious Office file used to deliver Malware on Mac OS X,” said AlienVault security researcher Jaime Blasco in a blog post on Tuesday.

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