During the past few decades of personal computing, moving files onto our computers has been a fairly straight forward process. We've stashed them on a drive—be it floppy, zip or USB—and then plugged the drive into a computer. The machine recognizes the drive and, a few drags and drops later, the files are copied.

But Apple's iPad is different. The device has no USB jacks, and users typically need to use Apple's proprietary 30-pin jack in order to shuttle files onto the tablet. And to do that, they need to go through iTunes. Well, Our decades of drag-and-drop training don't apply to the device.

But iTunes doesn't do a very good job of handling many common types of files. Despite continual updates from Apple, iTunes still feels like it was only designed to get music (and maybe the occasional movie) onto iPods—not to shuttle PDFs, text documents and huge numbers of photos onto an iPad. But it is far from enough for many people.

What should we do to solve this problem?

In fact, there's one very easy way to get smaller files onto your iPad: E-mail them to yourself. You won't want to do this with massive files, or a massive number of small files, but sending yourself a single photo or Word document as an attachment and then opening it on the iPad is quite simple.

Unfortunately, using e-mail as a gateway to the iPad is unwieldy and impractical for large—or large numbers of—files. To handle these cases, you need another approach.

A number of third-party apps are designed to link your iPad to either online storage services or your homebase computer. These programs typically allow you to gather and open all sorts of files. I think this ipad to mac transfer can help you a lot. Yes, I’ve used this software a bit so I do have a working knowledge of it.