The ONLY thing I want an iPad to do...and I can't get a straight answer

Hello, all!!
I am a musician who performs live acoustic cover gigs 3-5 nights a week. My act is a little different than most in that I will try just about ANY song that comes up as a request. I'm able to nail a large percentage of requests because I've built up a large database of Windows Notepad chord/lyric charts that I keep on my Windows laptop. I really loathe backing tracks in live performance and i don't use any, but the laptop on stage with me makes it look as though I'm using it for musical assistance - when in fact it's just a songbook. It's big, clunky, casts a bright light and looks like ****. It also requires that I set up a stand, etc...I have dreamed of something like the iPad to come along where I can mount it to my mic stand and discretely tab through songs and read the charts without having the freaking laptop up there with me. Sounded like the iPad was a dream come true until I heard that it DOESN'T READ .txt FILES such as those simple ones in Notepad???? I want to be able to do an alpha search just like I do in my contacts list on my iPhone. Why on earth wouldn't Apple make something so universal and necessary? I have over 1000 song files labelled by artist and I need to be able to tap the first letter of the artist and the scroll to the song then tap it and have the .txt lyric/chord chart pop up and scroll. Is it true that ipad won't do this?? I'm so disappointed. I mean, even a KINDLE will do this (but the screen's too small)...ugh

Hi, and welcome to Apple Discussions.
You can certainly do what you're describing with an iPad but you'll need additional software and you'll have to do a bit of transference work. Just get either HanDbase or Bento for the iPad and set up your database using the text files you already have. It will require you to set it up initially but most of it will be copying and pasting from your text files. However, since you have so many it will take awhile. HanDbase does import other databases so maybe creating this on your Windows machine first would be easier.
It sounds like you've created something of a proprietary system to view your text files, so you shouldn't be surprised that transferring it to another system (and the iPad is very much in a different galaxy than Windows) will involve some work. It's not difficult, but with over a thousand files it will be tedious, I admit.
Another way would be to use an iPad app that links the iPad by wifi to a computer. Then you would be basically doing the same thing you're doing now, accessing the folder where you text files reside alphabetically by artist name. However, you would need two things, wifi and your current computer, even though it could be located off stage. That is probably not something that you can gaurantee, the wifi part I mean.
There are also apps that allow you to transfer files to the iPad and use that app to then view them. These apps also let you set up folders (or virtual folders) on your iPad. You can then view any files in the folders as you would from Windows. Since text files are universally viewable, they'd be available to your iPad this way. However, this method only allows you to view the text file. It can't do anything else but view the thing. So if you need to do things with the text files after opening them, then the database option seems the only one for you if you want to go the iPad route.
Hope that's somewhat helpful and straightforward. Good luck. Definitely check it out thoroughly first before investing in the iPad, though.

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