Home Forums Peripherals & Multimedia iTunes, iPhone, iPod, iPad, Apple TV I pad issue word

Anyone read a long Word document on your ipad? Notice no booksmarks, and the word doc, does not resume where left off when go back to read later? And don't see pages numbers?

How one read an 80 pages Word doc on an ipad over a couple weeks comfortably?

Try exporting the 80 page document or printing it as a PDF, then import it into a app that supports bookmarks like Books that comes with iPadOS.

Joe great idea, thats it thanks.

Remember how to bookmark in PDFs? At least seems to leave off where you were, and page numbers... Boy Word is just worthless reading long things on an ipad.

Word was designed, built, and optimized for creating and formatting PRINT documents, not as a document reader, and is unsuited for reading large documents on any platform be it a Mac, Windows, iPad, Unix, iPhone, etc. The same can be said of any word processor, desktop publisher, or editor.

Thanks Joe, good info/ point.

PS Joe:

In pdf on ipad. I don't see page numbers in pdf too often. I try to force a page number and sometimes see the page number flash for a second in upper left. But I have no figured out how to consistently show what page on.

While there are dynamic elements in PDF it is a display format like JPG or HEIF and you only see what the creating application was told to put in the document. So if you created a document in Word and printed it to PDF there will only be page numbers if you created the page numbers in Word. By design, PDF only shows the original content and shows it exactly the same way on every device. There are document display apps like Books that can modify the displayed pagination and numbering of a PDF document, but those are a special case for a specific purpose and are contrary to the basic concept of PDF.

If you view the PDF in Apple's Preview and choose View>Show Sidebar, then each page displayed in the Sidebar will have a pagination number below it, even if the original document has no page numbering. The small individual page icon in the Sidebar is also highlighted so you know which page you are on in the main Preview window. It also seems to work this way if the View is set to Continuous Scroll or Single Page. It works as well in Two Pages view but the Sidebar retains the individual pagination.

Thanks Joe.

Ira, Usually I view things on laptop or imac.

But this pdf doc, I'm only looking at it in my comfortable morning chair on ipad pro.

I don't see page number, in the thumb drawer on the left. Which is why I posted.

Am I in preview? With IOS, I never know really what app I'm in.

Admittedly this is splitting hairs but

1. Pads have not run iOS per. se. in a couple of years, instead using a distinct variant, iPadOS, that has more macOS-like features. Many iPadOS apps will run on Apple Silicon Macs and a small, but growing number of macOS apps will run on iPadOS.
2. There is no Preview app or equivalent in either iOS or iPadOS, just as there is no Finder function. So there is no default app to open any file of any type.
3. It isn't easy for long time macOS user's to fully get their head around what is going on in iPadOS and iOS.

Assunming you are running iPadOS 16 this may help your perception of what is going on on your iPad.

1. In IpadOS 16 Go to Settings > Control Center and add Stage Manager to the list of included controls.
2. Then swipe down from the upper right corner of the screen to reveal the Control Center functions
3. Click on the Stage Manager icon. aa
4. If and when you have more than one app open your screen will look something like this and the icons will indicate which apps are currently open and running and usually the with focus will have an identifier so you know what app you are in.
5. If the foreground app is in full screen click and drag on the quarter moon icon at the bottom right of the window to reduce it.

By-the-way I use Stage Manager on both macOS and iPadOS most of the time.

Joe, don't see stage manager in control center. I updated just for this thread. says now: ipad os 16.5.1

This is what I see, you may need to scroll the screen down to get the rest of the options.

Not seeing it Joe

https://imgur.com/a/tu9xbYy

Joe your post got deleted I think, no showing. Yes this was the first ipad pro I think.