iWork for iCloud Beta Apps Now Accessible Without an Apple Device

[rvinny]

Honest question, why do you think that Numbers is unintuitive? Where does it throw you off?

Probably only because it's muscle memory at this point from using Office, but here are my pain areas;

Filters (turning them on/off & selecting seems more cumbersome)
Formatting cells (takes way more steps to do in Numbers) __> especially borders! Borders are so frustrating and enough to make me stop using Numbers
Pivot Tables and Macros - we use them

I try to use Pages and Keynote as well. The compatibility differences between Word <> Pages still cause me problems. I can't rely on doing something in Pages and have it show up 100% correctly in Word. I know the answer, PDF it, but that isn't always an option on a collaborative document.

Online editing and collaboration is a neat idea but in my work circle, everyone was turned off by it when we tried Google Docs. I don't think people would take me seriously if I asked them to use Pages online. The reality is the business world is still stuck with emailing files back and forth.

I'm stuck with either using Office in a Windows virtual machine (bad idea) or Office for Mac (worse idea)

 

[viorelgn]

And it screws Microsoft as I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't need all of the features in Office and a suite like this will work just fine with them. I'm assuming this has the same features as the Mac/iOS versions? I wonder If Photos will go there eventually too?

 

[notrack]

Probably only because it's muscle memory at this point from using Office, but here are my pain areas;

Filters (turning them on/off & selecting seems more cumbersome)
Formatting cells (takes way more steps to do in Numbers) __> especially borders! Borders are so frustrating and enough to make me stop using Numbers
Pivot Tables and Macros - we use them

I try to use Pages and Keynote as well. The compatibility differences between Word <> Pages still cause me problems. I can't rely on doing something in Pages and have it show up 100% correctly in Word. I know the answer, PDF it, but that isn't always an option on a collaborative document.

Online editing and collaboration is a neat idea but in my work circle, everyone was turned off by it when we tried Google Docs. I don't think people would take me seriously if I asked them to use Pages online. The reality is the business world is still stuck with emailing files back and forth.

I'm stuck with either using Office in a Windows virtual machine (bad idea) or Office for Mac (worse idea)

Intersting, thanks. I'm noticing the email-back-and-forth habit as well.

 

[Michael Goff]

And it screws Microsoft as I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't need all of the features in Office and a suite like this will work just fine with them. I'm assuming this has the same features as the Mac/iOS versions? I wonder If Photos will go there eventually too?

If iWork Online is enough for you, Office Online would likely be.

----------

Good luck Microsoft.
Nearly no presence in smartphones. Latest iPhone sales suggest this will drop in the year to come.
Major products Windows and Office are competing with OS's and productivity suites given away for free from two of the best capitalized and most innovative companies in the world (Google and Apple).

OEM hardware makers are unable to sell their high end devices in sufficient volume to compete on design and build quality with Apple, so high end of market seems to have moved nearly entirely to Mac. Devices like Retina iMac are coming out and months or possibly even a year later there is no sign of a competing product.
One fairly nice tablet hybrid form factor in the Surface that has semi-decent sales.
One fairly nice home console that is slightly underpowered compared to its rival, but is being propped up by Microsoft paying for software exclusives. And the hardware is sold at a loss.

And yet bith Office and Windows are billion dollar products. I wonder what that says...

 

[Hennesie2000]

I second that. Extremely cumbersome and totally unintuitive. Tried to set up a few spreadsheets for simple (very simple) cash flow. Took hours. Not using it again. This from a Mac user since 1989. No wonder they're giving it for free. Too much Apple software these days is not so user friendly as in the past. Must do better in this department, Apple.

For my uses Numbers is more than enough and is more intuitive than Excel, just my opinion for someone who doesn't need all of the features of Excel.

 

[brianvictor7]

The lack of comments on this piece of news is just another indication of how little it affects most iWork users. Apple's productivity suite is functional, but needs more love from the R&D budget masters. I found myself shifting from iWork back to MS Office because iWork lacks some features essential to my workflow. Oh well. Maybe this fall will see some real upgrades and I can shift back.

 

[itguy06]

1GB is laughable.... especially considering the extremely inferior product iWork is.

Depends on use case. I didn't even install Office on my new MBA. iWork has near perfect file translations, works fine, and was/is free.

My only issue is with how Numbers exports Excel docs but that could be easily fixed. For home stuff (loan amortizations, finance tracking, budgets,etc.), Numbers is fine. For business stuff it will work but if you do some advanced things it may not work. Yes, I've built complex spreadsheets in Numbers (energy tracking for multiple years with graphs and such) and they are fine.

Want to talk inferior, that's Google Docs.

I don't get why this is news. I access iWork online at work just fine - Chrome in Linux. It may pop up something about browser but say OK and you're in. It works reasonably well.

 

[DMinTX]

Why would anyone who doesn't own an Apple Device want to use iCloud? If you're an Android or Windows user, Google and Microsoft offer services that much better integrate with their devices.

I guess this is nice of Apple, but can't see any non-Apple users actually taking them up on their offer.

A free iCloud account will get my one black sheep Android son onto the family calendar.

Can an iCal calendar sync to an Android/Google Calendar?

 

[Freyqq]

At least 5 GB per device.

That would be a neat incentive to get people to buy more devices.

 

[MacrumoursUser]

That would be a neat incentive to get people to buy more devices.

Maybe even 15-20 GB for Macs. So you could backup to iCloud just like you can iOS. Something like time machine.

 

[JGIGS]

Hmm, you just quoted two products that your company bought maybe 10 years ago (for XP) and possibly 7 years ago (for office 2007) as an example about why microsoft is going be fine.

I'm not saying that Microsoft is going out of business anytime soon or even in the next decade. Windows isn't going anywhere. But Microsoft is giving away Windows 10 to all of its customers who are running Windows 7 and 8. So I'm guessing the revenue from the Windows franchise is decreasing now and will decrease consistently in the years to come.

Office is great, but the Word processing programs being given away for free are okay. Email works fine on other systems than Outlook. How long will companies continue to buy this stuff? Does anyone buy it for home personal use anymore?

But just because Microsoft is going to continue, doesn't mean that it doesn't have huge and obvious issues. If Windows 10 is given away, will Windows 11 be priced high to capture huge revenue, or does this ratchet only go in one direction? I think it does. Google and Apple will never charge for an OS and I think that means Mcsft will soon struggle to charge for its OS. The Chromebooks are coming up, year after year, better and better from the bottom. The tablet OS (android and iOS) get stronger and stronger each year. The Mac owns the high end, non-corporate, non-gaming market.

Also will developers continue to make software for Windows? They don't for Windows Mobile. Many folks work on web software that is OS agnostic. Otherwise they seem to be focused on iOS Apps. Don't you think that trends is going to continue to accelerate?

Company has legacy functions that slow down being able to upgrade to later versions of software. Very come in the large corporate world. Just because companies aren't buying the latest version they still need to pay a fee to install on new computers which they still replace, hire new employees etc. Not saying apple hasn't taken a bite out of MS profits just saying MS will be just fine for some time to come.

 

[StoneJack]

No autofilter.

You are wrong

 

[TallManNY]

Company has legacy functions that slow down being able to upgrade to later versions of software. Very come in the large corporate world. Just because companies aren't buying the latest version they still need to pay a fee to install on new computers which they still replace, hire new employees etc. Not saying apple hasn't taken a bite out of MS profits just saying MS will be just fine for some time to come.

Good point about those licenses. I forgot about those. Very material. And great for Mcsft's margins to be selling license to XP while providing very little ongoing support.
Still I think the issues I've pointed out are going to really become apparent in a year or two. But to be fair, I said the same thing two years ago and I was wrong then.

 

[TallManNY]

If iWork Online is enough for you, Office Online would likely be.

----------



And yet bith Office and Windows are billion dollar products. I wonder what that says...

Oh they are great products. But how long can they compete against free? Probably a long time, but not forever.

Really what I think McSft should have done a long time ago is fire everyone who isn't working on Office, Windows and Explorer, turns themselves into a pure software company with insane 1000% margins and kick out a huge dividend to its stockholders every quarter.

As far as I can tell, everything they've done in the last decade has been less profitable than the above strategy. And I don't see them as poised to be able to do much different.

There is probably a lot more to Mcsft than I know about and the above is a perhaps naive strategy. But I can't really point to anything besides its software that has made that much money. XBox 360 had a good run. But even that because of the low cost of the hardware and all the returns was supposedly not much of a money maker. And this next generation looks like it is going to really struggle.

 

[Michael Goff]

Oh they are great products. But how long can they compete against free? Probably a long time, but not forever.

Really what I think McSft should have done a long time ago is fire everyone who isn't working on Office, Windows and Explorer, turns themselves into a pure software company with insane 1000% margins and kick out a huge dividend to its stockholders every quarter.

As far as I can tell, everything they've done in the last decade has been less profitable than the above strategy. And I don't see them as poised to be able to do much different.

There is probably a lot more to Mcsft than I know about and the above is a perhaps naive strategy. But I can't really point to anything besides its software that has made that much money. XBox 360 had a good run. But even that because of the low cost of the hardware and all the returns was supposedly not much of a money maker. And this next generation looks like it is going to really struggle.

No, they can likely compete forever on the basis of actually being worth paying for.

 

[viorelgn]

We all know that iWork is just as good as Microsoft Office. I use Office all day, and iWork can't touch it, especially when you compare Numbers to Excel. The two things are not even in the same league. That hurts me to say because I love just about all other Apple software, but iWork simply is not a replacement for Office.

 

[kds1]

This is non-news. Apple is way too late to this game for offering "free" web versions of their productivity suite.

1GB is laughable.... especially considering the extremely inferior product iWork is.

Ther's nothing inferior about Keynote.

 

[Traverse]

Probably only because it's muscle memory at this point from using Office, but here are my pain areas;
Formatting cells (takes way more steps to do in Numbers) __> especially borders! Borders are so frustrating and enough to make me stop using Numbers

This. There is a familiarity aspects that favor Excel, but I tried to learn Numbers as I learned Pages, but it's so unintuitive.

I use borders all the time. Numbers' appalling implementation is enough for me to flee to Office.