I love my iPad but sometimes I despair of it – and Apple. I have a particular spreadsheet file I use daily that I store  in my marvellous Dropbox folder. That sends my file to the computing cloud, so I can access and update it on any of my computers. Except for the iPad. I’ve always been able to see the file in the iPad’s version of Dropbox, but I can only read it – I can’t modify it and then return it to Dropbox.

I can export the file from Dropbox to Apple’s top-line (and top $) Numbers spreadsheet program, where I can modify it. But  can I then save it back to Dropbox and thus make it available to all my computers? No way to do it. Well I could in a kludge, because I could email the file to myself, open it up an another computer then start working on it again. But that’s almost third world in computing terms.

And Numbers won’t let me go to my Dropbox and open up the file.

This is STUPID, Apple.

On my Android phone I can use Kingsoft Office to open the file from the phone’s version of Dropbox. I can modify it and save it back so it becomes accessible by my Windows computers.  Which I bloody well should be able to do on the iPad.

If the MS Office version for iPad is more than a rumour, hopefully it will be able to open stuff from Dropbox and save it back without clunky sending things by email. In other words behave like a normal ‘office’ program.

I’m mystified by the tablet advocates who claim the iPad  is going to replace desktop computing. Sorry – it’s a great complement to my computers, but it can’t replace them for most serious work while iOS has almost non-existent file manipulation capability and other inexplicable Apple-mandated restrictions. It’s time Apple stopped being so arrogant and took lessons from Android.

And don’t get me started on the mess Apple has made with music storage and filing with the ghastly iTunes system it makes you use when communicating with desktop computers. Give us drag ‘n drop, for heaven’s sake.

Drag ’n drop “just works” – to quote Apple’s mantra that unfortunately doesn’t always apply to its own products.

However, I admit that for casual home computing of an evening, the iPad is now my first choice. Indeed if I could work with that spreadsheet file on the iPad, my Acer netbook might head for TradeMe.