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CloudOn Brings Free Cloud-Hosted Microsoft Office Functionality to iPad

are they kidding us???

look at the mess of what-do-you-call-those-things cluttering up the upper screen—it's a mass of distraction and confusion, it's a failed user interface! F-minus!
 
AppleScruff1 said:
It will undoubtedly be a great product.
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Yeah definitely. I always thought the original iPad was nothing more than an over-sized iPod touch but they've worked hard at making it a relevant product.

With iPhone 5, the redesigned Macbook Pros and iPad 3, Apple could end up with a lot of my money this year...
 
Hooray, it's the Ribbon! Just in case your multi-tiered jumble of clustered & hidden commands and crazily sized icons hadn't wasted enough screen real estate on all your other devices, now it can ruin your iPad too!

Every time one of our sister companies gets a new system that replaces Excel 2003 with a more modern version, it's just another voice of constant cursing. Then again, most of the companies in our industry still run XP Pro too.

We use Numbers to generate .xls dummy spreadsheets to drive our parametric engineering, modelling, & FEA software in Windows. It's faster, mobile, seamless, & more presentable. Accounting software is for accounting.
 
Blast from the past....

In looking at the screen shots, I am reminded of the days I had a Tandy Model 100. I had a full size keyboard and a strip of a screen. Anything we did had to fit in that narrow strip. This iPad app looks like a narrow strip of a spreadsheet with a lot of the "real estate" of the iPad screen being taken up by the keyboard. Hey! This is great for the people who want to access their spreadsheets with a Pad but it seems for that kind of work, they would be better suited with a laptop. But, to each their own.
trs80-100.jpg
 
BillG53 said:
In looking at the screen shots, I am reminded of the days I had a Tandy Model 100. I had a full size keyboard and a strip of a screen. Anything we did had to fit in that narrow strip. This iPad app looks like a narrow strip of a spreadsheet with a lot of the "real estate" of the iPad screen being taken up by the keyboard. Hey! This is great for the people who want to access their spreadsheets with a Pad but it seems for that kind of work, they would be better suited with a laptop. But, to each their own.
Image
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Darn! It's been a long time since I saw this thing. Not bad for its time. Memories... :eek:
 
Renzatic said:
That's one thing I've noticed about the ribbon. For people like me who came into Office around 2007 rather like it. Since I learned the program with it, I find it fairly intuitive and well laid out. But people who have been using Excel and the other Office programs since, like you said, the beginning of time flat out hate it.

I'd say that because the ribbon changed the layout and work flow so much, the old guard hated it since day one, and never really gave it a chance.
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I agree with the old timers. We have gone against it at one of my jobs since we use Excel so much for one of the functions and it would actually slow us down a lot. We'd have to send everyone to a class to figure out simple things. I'm not sure I ever found set print area, though I admit it's been a long time since I looked.

I used it for about 2 years steadily at another job and never could get used to it. I'm all for change and improvement but I never could find improvement in the ribbon I'm afraid.
 
You know, a lot of people are complaining about the lack of space you can see on the screen due to the ribbon and the keyboard, well, the ribbon is a ridiculous idea from MS and if the keyboard is such a huge problem for you, then grow up and get a bluetooth keyboard or go buy a laptop.

I mean really, if you are using your iPad as a complete replacement for a laptop, then at this point you have probably already found a way to not use MS products since there is a definite lack of support. This app is a stop-gap until MS finally decides that they need to get caught up.

If you are still desperate to use MS software on your iPad and this app doesn't work for you, then you can always wait for the long promised MS version, but more than likely that will have a Metro style ribbon in it...Your other option would be to just shut up and then go buy a Windows 8 tablet when they are released...
 
heisetax said:
I've used MS Excel on my Macs since 1985. No one has shown that they can come close to MS Excel. Even MS is having trouble keeping Excel as good as it was. Just like Apple screwed up the Mac OS with Mac OS 10.7 Lion, MicroSoft has screwed up Excel with things like the ribbon. But the ribbon & most other things can be turned off, but the speed does not come back. With Lion many things can be turned off but not all. And who knows about the speed thing. iOS will soon have the same problems that Apple & MS has with their OSes. Adding things to make things look better but really only hurting the user use & experience.
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I've tried really hard to like iWork. I will probably buy the mobile version of Numbers. But I really can't get it to easily do the things I have been doing in Excel for years. I've tried Open Office and Neo Office. Same thing, I keep going back to Excel.

However my word processing needs are so simple I have no problem with Pages. I'm actually an old Word Perfect fan, boy did I hate to see that one disappear!

Back in the late 90's/early 2000's, I remember a new version of Excel coming out that more than doubled your original file size, unless as you went into each file, you deleted all the empty columns and rows. With accountants working with large spreadsheets to begin with, they really noticed the slowdown after the first time they saved a file in the new program. Maybe it was Office 97 that did that. Pretty interesting bug.
 
pewra said:
I've messed around with these services before, and it's almost always possible to break out of the restricted environment. Depending what you have access too, you can send a keypress for the windows menu, and gain access to the system that way.

Your IT department clearly isn't particularly clever. The IP addresses would still be in an assigned /C or /D block, regardless of them being 'reallocated'. I doubt they even would be, that's just asking for DNS caching problems.
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It bothers me when people try to talk tech who shouldn't. First, go tell Citrix that you can break out of their XenApp solution with some keypresses. APPLICATION virtualization has been done, and it's been done well. Get over your hax0r self.

Second (and third), its likely that the services he is describing are hosted on a cloud platform like EC2 and can't just be blocked with a contiguous range of IPs. I'd expect that from a company providing VOIP services, in fact. Additionally - C or D blocks?? Is this the 80's? Ever hear of classless inter-domain routing? I haven't seen a real C or D block in years.

I've written packet payload pattern matching rules for Mikrotik firewall/routers before, so unless the traffic is pretty darn random, the firewall administrator should still be able to deal with it.
 
Didn't work well for me.

Tried it last night. Connected with my Dropbox well. But it would not even open a .txt file to edit. I did not have an office doc in my dropbox to try.

Also has some kind of timer on the top. Says I have 2 hours of "remaining time". Do I get logged off? Kicked off? Have to pay?

Then I made a new Excel file. Looks like you're right in Office but working with the standard iPad keyboards is a pain. The = is on a different keyboard then the numbers, as is the *. So to do a formula =12*4 you start at the letters keyboard, hit the change to numbers key, hit the change to symbols key, hit =, change to numbers, hit 1, 2, change to symbols, hit *, change to numbers hit 4, hit return. They'll have to work on that.
 
robertpetry said:
They say they are "sold out" for the first phase of the offering. I think they are limiting the number of users for now.

You can go to their website and sign up at http://site.cloudon.com/ for the next release.

That stinks. I really wanted to try it.
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I'll bet they ran out of licenses for Office.

I still see this as a flop in the end. Office is simply not designed to run on a tablet.
 
Cougarcat said:
The only reason the buttons exist is because "it's the desktop version." And that's precisely the problem. The desktop version was designed for a cursor, not fat fingers. Remember the pre-iPad Windows-based tablets? Neither does anyone else. The reason is because the interface was like this: desktop-based, with no modification for touch.
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Ever tried Splashtop? It is a desktop streaming app that works great. The Ipad handles the "fat" fingers and determines where to click. With Splashtop you can zoom in and out easy for precise clicking which works great. I love that app and use it every day. I never have to sit at the desktop PC yet I use it every day. I live in Canada and can't try this cloud thing. I'm waiting for MS to release their office on the Ipad before I decide which to buy.
 
On the whole I like it and think it has terrific potential. I agree that some of the UI issues are....wonky to put it nicely. But, that's the fault of Office moreso than cloud on I think. I wonder how much ability they have to customize things further to make them better suited to the touchscreen experience.

It is a touch laggy on my iPad 2 and reasonably fast Internet connection. Still, it's the first thing that has me seriously tempted to switch away from my iWork/Dropbox/dropDAV productivity/file-system solution.

It also may push Microsoft to do better when it ultimately releases an iPad native version of Office...
 
Was able to download it, but not able to use it.
Their servers seemt to be completely overloaded.

That's the kind of useless BS you'll find in the Cloud or on teh intarwebs.

As always: if it doesn't cost anything, it's most likely not worth anything.

-t
 
When I try to open the page on itunes store, it says "The item you've requested is not currently available in the U.S. store."
What is that mean?
 
Has anyone tried to print with the app? I am asking because my wife was working at home today, she is MS based for work, and wasn't able to print out a PPT properly through my Mac or off an iPad. Keynote made formatting changes. We were just thinking of purchasing MS Office for Mac when CloudOn appeared. Unfortunately, the app was already pulled by the time we learned about.
 
ncaissie said:
Ever tried Splashtop? It is a desktop streaming app that works great. The Ipad handles the "fat" fingers and determines where to click. With Splashtop you can zoom in and out easy for precise clicking which works great. I love that app and use it every day. I never have to sit at the desktop PC yet I use it every day. I live in Canada and can't try this cloud thing. I'm waiting for MS to release their office on the Ipad before I decide which to buy.
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Splashtop can be useful when you forgot to move that file on your computer's desktop into your dropbox or iCloud for mobile manipulation (laptop or tablet). It's one of many remote desktop apps available for the iPad, but it's still painful to use for getting real work done on a tablet. The AppToU/CloudOn app seems like more of the same to me, but for Office only, which is so much less useful than my full desktop.
 
At first I found Splashtop tough to use but now I have the hang of it. I can copy files to different folders and rename them easily now. I also use it to upload file to Comiczeal wirelessly now thanks to wifi sync in iOS 5.
 
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