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Google Launches New iOS Apps for Google Docs and Sheets
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It took me about 2 minutes to find a 100% crash bug in Sheets. I use a rather large Sheet for work, not a lot of formulas, and it crashes as soon as I load the doc. 
This drives me insane! I'm glad it does work via Safari or my checklists would be useless.
Aren't you forgetting a third major category? Feature set? Don't get me wrong, I use iWork exclusively as the CFO of a small company, and have basically enforced this on our workforce in an all Mac work environment. Excel has been basically relegated to a glorified calculator and used for legacy files from before our switch, but there are still some things it is better at. (tools for analysis of large sets of data, like pivot tables, as the major example)
iWork is definitely king when it comes to easily making attractive, easy to understand documents and presentations. Keynote is in a league by itself, Numbers is far more attractive and easier to integrate with Keynote than the Excel/Powerpoint combination, and Pages produces equally more attractive end products than Word ever will.
Feature set:
Office, iWork, Google
Collaboration:
Google, iWork, Office
Great Looking, Professional Documents:
iWork, Office, Google
iWork = 2+2+3 = 7 points
Office = 3+1+2 = 6 points
Google = 1+3+1 = 5 points
A simple fact destroys your entire argument in terms of productivity suites:
Office is available on both Windows and Mac, in addition to Windows and iOS mobile platforms. iWork is available on Mac and iOS platforms.
The closed ecosystem nature of Apple products will trap iWork from being able to break into the mainstream and explode into the corporate world, which revolves mostly around Windows PCs.
And for the record, subjectively, I think Pages and Numbers are substantially dumbed down versions of Word and Excel. I don't think highly of them, especially when I need to compute advanced quantitative statistics. Numbers is embarrassingly under-powered to be a legitimate contender to Excel.
iWork for iCloud is available for people stuck on PCs. Send me your "advanced quantitative statistics" file and I'll compute it for ya...on my iPhone with Numbers.
1. Office is already installed in most work-issued computers. And considering most people in the company are using the same productivity suites, why would I use iCloud.com? If you work in a company where 50+ employees have immediate access to Office and have established Office as the standard, why would you use iCloud.com to collaborate with them?
2. On your iPhone, please create a pivot table from a set of sales reports to show total sales returns for each product by market. Then, use that pivot table to identify the salesperson with the best monthly numbers, and individual sales numbers of that rep across the entire catalog of products available.
In addition, if I were to send you a Word presentation for a new product proposal for review, could you track changes for me?
How does this differ from the Google Drive app that can create and edit spreadsheets.
The current Google drive app supports offline viewing of files but not creating/editing. Google Docs app now supports this.
1. It's free in both price and bloat.
2. Spreadsheet calculations were calculated long before pivot tables were introduced. Is it a useful tool? Yes. Can it be calculated without it? Probably.
While Numbers does not do Pivot Tables, some of the functionality can be done with categories. Here is one way. http://macmost.com/pivot-tables-in-iwork-09-numbers.html
The video is old but the same can be accomplished with the new app.
And Pages can track changes.
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Not very well regretfully. Pages always had a habit of just not bothering to track for me.
We did it because it was a top down policy decision, given we did a cost analysis (using Excel) and found we saved a very substantial amount on our IT budget over the life of the hardware by not having to pay for Windows, Anti-virus, and Office licenses for each machine. So we converted to Macs and use iWork as the official primary productivity suite.
Good example - pivot tables are the one thing I want Numbers to be able to do, but at the same time that is actually the only thing I miss. That and Find-Replace within a formula.
However, in reality, that sort of analysis is most effectively done inside of your CRM solution as backend database queries and shown on a nice realtime modern dashboard. If your CRM can't do the analysis you describe above, you should probably find one that can (even the free open source community edition of Sugar CRM can do this, check it out) - this is exactly what CRM's are for. Doing that sort of thing manually in Excel today seems so 90's.
You're right, but isn't realtime collaboration the direction this is going in? iWork is actually ahead of Office in this regard. Pages can track changes, but Word's implementation is better, and in situations where realtime is not possible, track changes is currently king.
The idea that compatibility plays a big role is only true when you look at it from the bottom up. Exactly like one may feel one can't use iWork at work because everyone else is using Office, and your boss uses Office, if a top down decision is made, then suddenly you can't use Office because your co-workers and your boss are using iWork.
If I am sending something external is is always PDF or HTML anyways. I never send an editable file to an external party unless it is our auditors, and they get excel files exported from iWork.
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Nice, very useful info - the real question is, can I still do this with the new Numbers?
I haven't tried. And thanks for the info on SugarCRM. I didn't know about them.
Software has to do several things to be interesting:
1) Read all my old files (Excel, Word, Works, RTF, HTML, text (pure), etc)
2) Write to most formats - all of the above in a variety of versions so I can give files to other people who don't have the software I have.
3) Work.
4) Be around for the future. Google has a bad track record on this.
5) Not be a subscription. Microsoft and Adobe lose here.
Bonus: Be useable on both my desktop (MacOSX) across multiple versions (10.4.8 through modern) and also on iOS devices (3.2 through modern).
So far nothing does all of this. I keep dreaming.
1) Read all my old files (Excel, Word, Works, RTF, HTML, text (pure), etc)
2) Write to most formats - all of the above in a variety of versions so I can give files to other people who don't have the software I have.
3) Work.
4) Be around for the future. Google has a bad track record on this.
5) Not be a subscription. Microsoft and Adobe lose here.
Bonus: Be useable on both my desktop (MacOSX) across multiple versions (10.4.8 through modern) and also on iOS devices (3.2 through modern).
So far nothing does all of this. I keep dreaming.
What excites me about this, which no one has yet to mention.... Is google scripts.
I never played around with drive enough so this probably had the functionality, but I now have a simple interface for my documents that can run scripts. Brilliant!
I never played around with drive enough so this probably had the functionality, but I now have a simple interface for my documents that can run scripts. Brilliant!
Again with the horrible, fake 3D bevel on the app icon. Luckily I have no intention of using these apps.
Luckily something inconsequential like that has no effect on the functionality/usefulness of an app.
re: Lotus (IBM)
Umm, unless things changed, I thought IBM was phasing out Lotus 1-2-3 and the rest of the SmartSuite as of last year?
http://www.zdnet.com/goodbye-lotus-1-2-3-7000015385/
Umm, unless things changed, I thought IBM was phasing out Lotus 1-2-3 and the rest of the SmartSuite as of last year?
http://www.zdnet.com/goodbye-lotus-1-2-3-7000015385/
Quickoffice is for editing MS Office files. Google Drive (and these apps) are for editing files from your Google Drive and they use the Google document format.
Still can't embed images?
Am I the only one who thinks that being unable to insert an image is a big drawback? Maybe when they come out with Slides, and must provide that functionality, they will integrate it within Docs and Sheets??
Am I the only one who thinks that being unable to insert an image is a big drawback? Maybe when they come out with Slides, and must provide that functionality, they will integrate it within Docs and Sheets??
I spent the $99 for Office 365 subscription, since we have 5 Macs and 2 iPads in the house. Nevertheless, I predict that, in the long-run, Office 365 subscriptions prices will likely drop substantially.
In the old days, if you wanted to use productivity software, there was basically only one option......shrink wrapped MS Office. Even if your needs were very simple, you were still pretty much forced into it. But now there are viable options for people with simpler needs. Even at work, 90% of my colleagues only use a small fraction of MS Office functionality and features......for most people it is overkill.
This free offering from Google, combined with Apple's iWorks, is one more step along the path to folks migrating away from MS Office. The subscription prices will likely follow downward as well.
Only time will tell.
In the old days, if you wanted to use productivity software, there was basically only one option......shrink wrapped MS Office. Even if your needs were very simple, you were still pretty much forced into it. But now there are viable options for people with simpler needs. Even at work, 90% of my colleagues only use a small fraction of MS Office functionality and features......for most people it is overkill.
This free offering from Google, combined with Apple's iWorks, is one more step along the path to folks migrating away from MS Office. The subscription prices will likely follow downward as well.
Only time will tell.