Microsoft Office for iPad

Although you may be tempted to ask why it took Microsoft so long to introduce Office into iPad and other tablets, given the growing popularity of these devices, I will not delve into that aspect of the new development in this article, as I first want to savor the opportunities that this event brings to […]

Although you may be tempted to ask why it took Microsoft so long to introduce Office into iPad and other tablets, given the growing popularity of these devices, I will not delve into that aspect of the new development in this article, as I first want to savor the opportunities that this event brings to anyone whose business involves creating documents and presentations, as they can now do so on the go, touchy-feely, in their favorite tablets. Moreover, you can be sure that the project to migrate Office to non-Microsoft tablets did not just start last week, given the efforts that such an undertaking will require in order to make the programs work properly and in an optimal fashion in the tablets. You can now generate Word documents, create and view PowerPoint documents, and use Excel to generate spreadsheets in iPad.
To be sure, Microsoft has deployed (non-operating system) tools on Apple’s smart devices before: Office in iPhone in June of last year, and OneNote, a note-taking app for the iPad. However, the Office in iPhone has severely-limited functionality, not to mention the small screen of iPhone, which can honestly only support proof-of-concept document creation capabilities. Obviously, you won’t try to produce a decent document on an iPhone!
The delay in bringing Office to iPad might have some effects in its eventual adoption by users on iPad, but my feeling is that the effects may turn out to be inconsequential after all. Before now, iPad productivity-users have relied on tools from companies other than Microsoft to do their job. Such tools include Apple’s own iWorks suite, Evernote, Quip, Smartsheet, and Haiku Deck. As an example, Quip, a word-processing program, is an app that works on iPad, smartphones, and desktops through a web browser. Employees in a company using Quip can work together on a document, by making changes of their own and viewing, in real time, the changes made on the document by collaborators.
So, how much is it going to cost you? The subscription model for Office in iPad sounds pretty much like Acrobat’s for its popular PDF (Portable Document Format) product. To just view (read) documents produced by others using Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, you don’t pay a penny: Just download the Office apps from Apple’s iTunes store and start using them. However, to create your own Office documents in iPad, you will need to purchase the license for the Office suite, the latest version of which is called Office 365. The acquisition is via a subscription model, costing you $100 for an annual subscription to the Home Premium edition ($10 monthly), $80 for Academic license, and $70 for the Personal edition (to be released in a couple of months). This license fee allows you five downloads of the Office suite on Mac or PC, in addition to five downloads on tablets. By comparison, the iPhone version, which is free, allows you to view, create, and edit Office documents, although, as pointed out earlier in this article, you really can’t do much on an iPhone because of the small screen and the reduced functionality of the version of Office in that device.
What kinds of user-experience are you likely to get from Office in iPad? (The three Office components listed above became available on the iPad, running iOS 7.0 or later, on 27 March 2014.) Microsoft said that, for this first deployment, it focused on supporting the most-used features of the apps, with a plan to continuously add more functionality. I learnt that the Office suite in iPad is only compatible with Microsoft’s OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) cloud storage service. Thus, if your files are in Google Drive or Dropbox, you might need to also open up a OneDrive account. Bonnie Cha on 27 March 2014 in the online “Recode” magazine, describes some of her experiences using the new Office suite in iPad. She said she ran into a couple of minor problems with formatting and the Word app crashed on her a couple of times. When creating documents, she says you can choose from a variety of templates, although the choices aren’t as comprehensive as in the desktop (laptop) version. It seems there is not yet support for printing. The Office for iPad has the auto-save feature, so you wouldn’t lose much if the program crashes on you, as it probably will. Bonnie said that “although you can open email attachments by doing a long-press on the attachments and selecting ‘Open in Word,’ I wasn’t able to do so directly from my Gmail account.” With Excel, you have access to different charts, formats, and filters, and the app is iPad-friendly. “Because they recognized that most people are entering numbers into spreadsheets, there is now a ‘123’ button in the upper right-hand corner that you can press to bring up a number pad like you’d find on a physical keyboard. Keys that have a little green mark in the corner also signify that you hold them down to access other symbols, so you don’t have to press the Shift button.” Finally, PowerPoint supports tools that allow you to mark up slides using a pen, and you can bring up a laser pointer by holding your finger on the screen.
The bottom line in this article is that, last week Thursday, Microsoft unveiled its bread-and-butter Office productivity tools (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) in iPad. I expect this event to be a big boon to productivity buffs.