Transfer iPad Pages documents to Google Docs

Last December Google Docs stopped supporting the increasingly useful “email in” feature that allowed you to email in documents to your Google Docs account. Since the iPad version of Pages is so poor in sharing documents, I was hoping to be able to use this feature to send documents to my Google Docs account. Alternatively, you could use one of the still poor-quality third-party word processors that support Google Docs sync, available in the App store (Mobile Editor is a sham, while Office HD2 is decent, but far from elegant). I also had no luck copy and pasting from Pages to Office HD2, hoping I could create a document in pages and copy it over to the Google Docs-aware Office HD2 (this ended up crashing my iPad, actually).

Instead, here’s the roundabout way of sending your Pages documents to Google Docs:

• Create a Pages document.
• Email a copy of the Pages document to yourself (to a valid Gmail account, obviously).
• Open Safari on your iPad, open Gmail. (Here’s the hack) At the bottom of the page switch from the mobile (iPad-specific) version of Gmail to the “Desktop” version. You may receive a warning about using an unsupported browser.
• Open the email to yourself in the desktop version of Gmail. Click “Open in Google Docs”.

After a short conversion process the document will open in (read-only) Google Docs for mobile. You can now access this Google Doc document on any other computer or through third-party Google Docs-aware applications