The essential apps you’ll need

With Apple’s Pages, Numbers and Keynote available for free, every iPad has the productivity basics covered. Photos can manage your media, and Safari covers web browsing. Mail should accommodate all your email accounts, GarageBand is on hand for soundtracks, and iBooks displays PDFs. Unless you’re a die-hard Apple purist who never works with anyone except other die-hard Apple purists, however — and if so, we salute you — you may need a bit more to complete your do-it-all mobile workstation. Although Apple’s apps happily handle Microsoft Office documents, there are limits to the accuracy of their conversions, so it makes sense to add Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, all designed for iPad and free to install, along with Outlook and OneNote.

To keep their full functionality after 30 days you’ll need an Office 365 subscription, from $79.99 per year from products.office.com. For arcane reasons, iPad Pro users without a subscription can only view documents, while those with other iPad models get free basic editing for “non-commercial purposes” — see bit.ly/msoft_resources.

Desktop dealbreakers

A few of the desktop apps’ more advanced capabilities aren’t available even if you pay, which could be a deal-breaker if you need them regularly. For example, Word on iPad includes key features such as Track Changes, but lacks endnotes and equation editing; and Excel’s Pivot Tables can’t be created or manipulated, although Pivot Tables already set up in a document are displayed.

To keep in touch with colleagues, FaceTime is ideal if they’re Apple users, and Skype works fine if not; Slack also has an iOS app optimized for iPad, and integrates with Google Drive, Dropbox, and so on. If you need to do more advanced things with PDFs, Readdle’s PDF Expert ($9.99, pdfexpert.com/ios) is comprehensive.