iPad Apps for MS Office Files

[jhanlon]

There are now three principal apps for importing, editing and exporting MS Office files (Word & Excel): Documents to Go, QuickOffice, and Office2 HD.

I have purchased Office2 HD and I am disappointed with its capabilities. It cannot handle large tables in a Word document; cannot handle headers and footers, plus other lesser faults which added up make it largely an unreliable tool for other than plain and simple documents. (I have not heavily tested the Excel capabilities.)

What is our collective experience with these apps? Rather than continue to purchase inadequate apps, perhaps we could collect our individual testing results here so that we can all make a better decision on which one to use.

Note that the intent here is to not include the Apple apps because they do not provide export compatibility with MS Office for exchanging files.

 

[caubeck]

Pages - currently my go-to app, but when I start composing more complex texts I'll probably move to

Documents to Go, which handles such basic features as search and endnotes, even if it all looks a bit oversized in landscape mode. And sometimes I open up

QuickOffice just to take a look, and I wonder if I shouldn't start moving my writing there (it's such a colorful and happy app), but then recall its lack of search, unnecessary zoom-in behavior for selecting text, and its inability to handle images or endnotes (and isn't that text a bit fuzzier than in Pages and D2G?). So I close it again.

Office2 HD just sits there on my home screen, like on death row, hoping for a last-minute update.

Early days, early days.

 

[Jaro65]

^^^^^
Early days, early days indeed. I've been using QuickOffice and I'm quite happy with it.