Microsoft Office for iPad was one of the apps I was most excited about earlier this year. However, after seeing Office for Windows 8 in touch mode in several videos (e.g.: the
video by Ross Miller from The Verge and the
video by Ed Bott from ZDNet), my excitement has dwindled. It seems to me that rather than giving folks the "best of both worlds" with Windows 8 that they are doing the worst of both worlds. I have no confidence that an iOS version of Office would be any more touch-friendly than the desktop-mode versions we see in Windows RT demonstrations. Microsoft's idea of "touch mode" is making the icons bigger and putting more space in between them. However, there is so much more that can be done with an app when you know it is being used for a touch input. Microsoft's problem is that Windows 8 is designed to support both touch and mouse input and because of that, neither is optimized.
I fully believe that Microsoft Office for iOS would sell better than Windows 8 RT, but I also believe it will be a huge disappointment. This is coming from a guy who was willing to spend upwards of $100 on an iOS Office suite just six months ago.
I feel I am now consigned to choosing between a nice touch interface via iWork with limited functionality or tons of functionality and a cruddy interface to use it. Keynote is the only good iWork app on iPad, Pages is okay and Numbers is downright annoying. The worst thing about iWork/iCloud syncing is opening a document and having the iOS version tell you it is going to dumb-down your document and asking you if you want to work in a copy. I had this happen with a simple book I was writing in Pages -- the book had nothing but paragraphs and words (nothing fancy). iWork for iOS is still great for "on the go", but I wanted to be great as a "primary platform" and I want it to be completely document-compatible with its Mac counterparts via iCloud document syncing.