The validity of the iPad as a casual device—something you can use to check your e-mail, surf the Internet on the couch, or watch a movie in bed—has never really been in question. The real question is, "Can I convince my boss to buy me one?" Unless your boss is Michael Scott, chances are he’s going to want to know if you can actually be productive with it. With its port of the iWork desktop suite, Apple is hoping that you can be, and that the iPad can be more than a toy.

“I’m an importer/exporter.”

iWork for the iPad wouldn’t be of much use if you could create documents only to have them constrained to the device. Fortunately, Apple has included import and export functionality; unfortunately, that import and export functionality isn’t very good. There are three import/export flavors to choose from, multiple formats, a cable, and an application that is already asked to do too much.

When it comes to importing and exporting, your best bet is e-mail. You can import Word and Pages documents into Pages, Excel and Numbers documents into Numbers, and Powerpoint and Keynote documents into Keynote from any e-mail you receive.

Exporting through e-mail, on the other hand, isn’t as flexible. You can export a Pages document as a Pages document, a Word document, or a PDF; a Keynote presentation in the native format or a PDF (PPT format is inexplicably left out); and a Numbers document in Numbers format or as a PDF (no XLS exporting). While the choices would be excellent if all our colleagues used iWork on a Mac, the majority do not. So the suite's e-mail export functionality is lacking, which is sad, because it’s the best option. If you need to make a few quick changes to that Excel spreadsheet that your colleague sent to you and then send it back to her quickly, you'll have to send it back in Numbers format and hope she can do the conversion on her end.

The second option for importing and exporting is Apple’s iWork.com. To work on a document that's on iWork.com, you have to download it in Mobile Safari, prompting the device to open it within the application. This wasn’t immediately clear to me at first, as I thought that it was only possible to view a document stored in the iWork service on the iPad through Mobile Safari. It wasn’t until I read our complete iPad review that I realized you could download and edit the whole document.

Exporting to iWork.com after you've made your changes is straightforward—you simply choose iWork.com from the export dialog from the main menu of any of the iPad applications. The export also lets you send e-mail notifications of what document is being shared, as well as a URL to the document. In a perfect world, you would just load an iWork share similar to a MobileMe drive, but the service is in beta, so there may yet be hope.

One nice thing about iWork.com is that PC users can download documents from the service in a format that they can actually read and write, which means that it's less difficult to collaborate on documents with Microsoft Office users.

The third and final import/export option is what Apple calls "file sharing." You need a computer with iTunes installed, an iPad (of course), and perhaps most irritating, a USB-to-dock connector cable. The whole experience of tethering the iPad to the computer really brings back memories of connecting two machines via a null modem cable to play Warcraft in 1996.

To import a file, whether a PPT, Keynote, Excel, Numbers, Pages, or Word document, you must first plug your iPad into your computer, open iTunes, go to the "Apps" tab, scroll to the bottom, select the application you want to send a document to, and then choose the file from an open dialog box. Once you're done with that, you go back to the iPad, go to the "open a document" screen in any of the three apps, tap on the folder icon on the upper right-hand corner of the screen, and then select the document you want to import. It really is like magic(k)! I’m no marketing expert, but Apple may want to stay away from the phrase “There is no step 10!” in the advertising materials.

Exporting is done in much the same way, but in reverse: you select a menu option from within the app that lets you export via file sharing, then you connect the iPad to the computer, open iTunes, open the Apps tab, scroll to the bottom, find the document you want, and finally drag it into a folder on your computer. You can then open the document on your desktop or laptop computer.

The whole "file sharing" process is obviously just another step towards iTunes replacing the Finder. Why can’t I do this over Bluetooth or WiFi? Why doesn’t the iPad just mount on the desktop like a drive? In Apple’s attempt to make this as simple as possible for everyone, they have made it excruciating for those who know what they are doing, and inexplicably difficult for those who have no clue.

Importing and exporting across formats is basically what you would expect. Some formatting is wrong, errors crop up, but the majority of the content is there. There are, however, certain features that just aren’t supported in the iWork for iPad suite. During our testing, we ran into issues importing across applications, but also when importing from the desktop version of the software to the iPad version. Some of the errors we ran into stemmed from the iPad app's inability to group objects, and we also saw some table-related issues. If what you're doing is mission-critical, you must check formatting and errors before presenting an end product, and remind yourself this isn’t the same iWork suite you're accustomed to on the Mac.