One of the most difficult adjustments business users may find when getting accustomed to iOS devices such as the iPad is the closed nature of the device and how to get their documents and data transferred to it.
Unlike a laptop computer, you just can't connect a USB stick or a storage card into it and copy files en masse to a directory on the device that any number of applications can directly access.
On the iPad, each application maintains its own distinct database and is for the most part isolated from one another via a security layer known as "sandboxing". Additionally, the iPad has no native facility for networking with corporate or cloud-based file servers.
Instead, there are a number of programs which can allow you to add this capability in.
The most important of which is $5 application and should be considered a mandatory download, GoodReader.
GoodReader will be the best $5 you've ever invested in your iPad. With this seemingly magical application, you can view PDF and a myriad of other data formats including Microsoft Office, HTML, image files as well as audio and video formats.
Additionally, you can connect to several popular cloud-based storage services including, Microsoft OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive), DropBox (which has its own viewer app but is inferior to GoodReader) WebDAV servers and directly access files stored on Google Docs and within GMail itself.
As if this wasn't impressive enough, you can also directly transfer files to GoodReader wirelessly using a simple Web-based GUI from your PC or Mac, or via WebDAV-based drag and drop network share.
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