Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me transfer documents

Dear Aunt TUAW,

I am a college professor who has all my class prep work stored on USB drives. How may I transfer all these Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents to my iPad? I have the new updates for Numbers, Pages, and Keynote on my iPad 2. Please help an overworked teacher do a better job! Thank you!

Your loving nephew,

Larry

Dear Larry,

Larry, meet Dropbox. Dropbox, meet Larry. You're going to love each other. As far as moving documents from Office to the iPad apps, you're not going to do much better. Yes, there's iCloud, but Dropbox works on more platforms and with greater flexibility right now.

You get 2GB by default, and can increase that by 250MB if an existing Dropbox user invites you with a referral They get an additional 250MB, too). The free plan goes up to 8GB after maxing out referral bonuses.

The Dropbox app on iPad has an "open in" option, and you can just save stuff into your Dropbox folder on your home computer, editing as needed. What's more, by saving to Dropbox, you get automatic backup and access to your stuff from anywhere, plus the simplicity of opening files using built-in iOS features.

Hugs,

Auntie T.