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What4 Author

Level 1

0 points

Download spreadsheet and open on iPad?

In an online course that I teach, I regularly download the grades as a spreadsheet and open them, in OS X, with Excel. I can download in either Excel format or tab-delimited text format.

I access the course through the browser.

How can I do this download on an iPad 3 and open the grades in a spreadsheet program like DocsToGo?

When I try, it appears that the browser is attempting to open the download.

Is there any way to get past the iPad's attempt to corral all files into the app that created them (in this case, the browser that downloaded the spreadsheet)?

If I download the spreadsheet on the OS X laptop and put it into Dropbox, I can readily open it on the iPad using DocsToGo. That is not the solution I am looking for.

Thanks for your attention.

iPad (3rd gen) Wi-Fi + Cellular (VZ), iOS 6.0.2

Posted on Jan 29, 2013 7:14 PM

17 replies

ddkilzer

Level 2

344 points

Feb 5, 2013 1:00 PM in response to What4

I'm sorry, it appears that GoodReader won't let you change a file's extension when it's renamed. I recall an older version of the app letting you change the file extension.

BTW, if you want to preview a comma-separated value file in Safari, you need to download the document with the *.csv extension. It will be formatted like a (very basic) spreadsheet.

What4 Author

Level 1

0 points

Feb 5, 2013 2:05 PM in response to ddkilzer

Thank you. As I said elsewhere, this spreadsheet is so very wide that displaying it in Safari as data separated by commas in a .csv file does little good.

Seen as a .csv vile in Safari, no column lines up. It's all wrapped into a solid churn of numbers and commas that I can neither read nor save to a program capable of displaying it in columns.

I can live without solving this problem, but others who use the on-demand-data Web will also run into this difficulty on the iPad in its current state.

Download spreadsheet and open on iPad?