Microsoft Office for iOS

[That-Guy]

Not sure about others but after reading all the rumours today that Microsoft have Office for iOS ready but just picking their moment to release, it's got me excited.

Yes I know there are alternatives but my place of work relies on office and I can't see them changing to anything else anytime soon. I have tried other solutions for iOS but they never display my documents correctly.

So what should we expect:

- Will it require a subscription? (Office 365 or similar)

- Will they charge for the App if it requires a subscription?

- Will it work offline or will it require an internet connection?

- Will it sync to Dropbox as well as OneDrive?

- Will it be fully compatible with the desktop file formats?


The answers to these questions could make or break office for iOS, I just hope Microsoft get it right.

What does everyone else think? What would you like to see?

 

[ScottNWDW]

How I feel the Office for iPad will play out to the questions raised by the OP.

It will most likely be subscription based like Office 365.
Like Office 365 it will not have a charge for the app.
You should be able to work with it offline without an internet connection.
It will sync to Microsoft OneDrive only.
It will be mostly but not 100% compatible with the desktop format.

 

[MRU]

We've been waiting for Office for iPad for a long while, and despite rumours we will likely be waiting longer ....

IF it does see release I'd expect it to require an Office 365 subscription and likewise will sync with OneDrive only (not third parties).

 

[glenthompson]

So what should we expect:

- Will it be fully compatible with the desktop file formats?

I think it will maintain file compatibility but the iOS version won't support all the capabilities of the desktop version. You won't lose data when editing on the iPad but you might not be able to edit certain items.

 

[fhall1]

If it requires a subscription, it'll be DOA unless the cost is something like $4.99 per year.

 

[MacDawg]

Unfortunately, I don't see it having full MS Office compatibility
And I have no interest in it if it is subscription based

 

[That-Guy]

Well it looks like March 27th is the date of release: http://www.imore.com/microsoft-office-ipad-might-land-soon-march-27

It also looks like it will require a 365 subscription

Just wondering if it will allow you to edit files offline as my iPad will not have internet access at work, only at home.

 

[oldpos]

Not sure about others but after reading all the rumours today that Microsoft have Office for iOS ready but just picking their moment to release, it's got me excited.

Yes I know there are alternatives but my place of work relies on office and I can't see them changing to anything else anytime soon. I have tried other solutions for iOS but they never display my documents correctly.

So what should we expect:

- Will it require a subscription? (Office 365 or similar)

- Will they charge for the App if it requires a subscription?

- Will it work offline or will it require an internet connection?

- Will it sync to Dropbox as well as OneDrive?

- Will it be fully compatible with the desktop file formats?


The answers to these questions could make or break office for iOS, I just hope Microsoft get it right.

What does everyone else think? What would you like to see?

Wait another four days and you'll get your answers, and they'll be more accurate!

 

[Serelus]

- Will it require a subscription? (Office 365 or similar)

From what I've heard, yes it wil.

 

[rhett7660]

Unfortunately, I don't see it having full MS Office compatibility
And I have no interest in it if it is subscription based

That makes two of us. I have no desire to rent my software. Heck I am still on Office 2007 and my work is still on 2007, 2010, and is now just starting to roll out 2013.

I would like my iPad to have MS Office, but I am not going to pay yearly for it. I will keep my "DocsToGo" which works for what I need it to do.

 

[roadbloc]

If it requires a subscription, it'll be DOA unless the cost is something like $4.99 per year.

For consumers maybe (most will be fine with iWork and the like anyway). For businesses, this will be crucial part of Office 365.

 

[r0k]

First Impression: It's a dud!

Well it's out and it costs $99 a year for an Office 365 subscription if you want to do anything but "view". I've read reviews in the app store saying users with existing subscriptions were unable to log in and were instead prompted to buy ANOTHER Office 365 for $99. I took a look and considered downloading this until I found out Word, Excel and Powerpoint were over 200 MB EACH. I don't have 600 MB to splurge on crippleware. Then there's the lack of ability to sync with anything but Onedrive. I'm heavily invested in icloud, dropbox and google drive right now and I don't need to wrap my head around yet another cloud. Besides, I already have the excellent iWork apps which do take up even more space but don't require a subscription. Sorry, MS but it looks like you missed the mark on this one. Big time.

I would like to install and give MS Office for iOS a try. Perhaps I'll simply install the iPhone version which weighs in at only 50MB.

 

[madeirabhoy]

That makes two of us. I have no desire to rent my software. Heck I am still on Office 2007 and my work is still on 2007, 2010, and is now just starting to roll out 2013.

I would like my iPad to have MS Office, but I am not going to pay yearly for it. I will keep my "DocsToGo" which works for what I need it to do.

thats the thing, docstogo was i think 17 euro when i bought it, connects to dropbox, box.com and a few others and does word, excel and powerpoint pretty well.

 

[rhett7660]

thats the thing, docstogo was i think 17 euro when i bought it, connects to dropbox, box.com and a few others and does word, excel and powerpoint pretty well.

That sounds about right. I think I paid $14 for it and you are right, it handles MS documents pretty darn well. I have not ran into anything it couldn't handle. But then again I do not do a lot of VBA behind the scenes in excel. Most of the stuff I do is pretty straight forward.

 

[ScottNWDW]

Well it's out and it costs $99 a year for an Office 365 subscription if you want to do anything but "view". I've read reviews in the app store saying users with existing subscriptions were unable to log in and were instead prompted to buy ANOTHER Office 365 for $99. I took a look and considered downloading this until I found out Word, Excel and Powerpoint were over 200 MB EACH. I don't have 600 MB to splurge on crippleware. Then there's the lack of ability to sync with anything but Onedrive. I'm heavily invested in icloud, dropbox and google drive right now and I don't need to wrap my head around yet another cloud. Besides, I already have the excellent iWork apps which do take up even more space but don't require a subscription. Sorry, MS but it looks like you missed the mark on this one. Big time.

I would like to install and give MS Office for iOS a try. Perhaps I'll simply install the iPhone version which weighs in at only 50MB.

If you p[lan on trying the iPhone version to see if you like the iPad version it would be like trying to eat a banana to see what an orange taste like. They are completely different apps. The iPhone app does not have 90% of the features found in the iPad apps.

600MB, is too much? Hmmmmm how much space does iWork take up?
$99 a year subscription is for an Office 365 subscription. That includes the latest versions of Office for Mac, Office 2013 for Windows, 20GB of extra OneDrive space etc. Office 2014 for the Mac will be out shortly and would also be included in that as it will replace the current Office 2011 for the Mac. By reading many of these threads it sounds as though people are mistakenly thinking that the $99 subscription is just for the iPad version. Well it is not and it is actually a bargain when you look at the whole picture:

5 installs on either a Mac or Windows machine, AND 5 installs on a qualifying tablet (iPad, Surface, or other Windows based tablets- android coming soon)
so that basically comes out to $10 a device annually if you use all 5 desktop and tablet allocation. as for OneDrive you get 7GB free and the subscription adds 20GB additional space to bring it up to 27GB, which is quite a bit. iCloud gives you I believe 5GB free and and the additional 20 costs something like $50 a year.

You can download the Office for the iPad apps and view documents for free.
If you just have a Mac and one iPad, wait another few weeks and get the Office 365 Personal subscription of $6.99 a month or $70 a year. That will get you all the same features as the $99 version with the exception that it is good for just 1 desktop and 1 tablet as opposed to 5 desktop and 5 tablets.

 

[r0k]

If you p[lan on trying the iPhone version to see if you like the iPad version it would be like trying to eat a banana to see what an orange taste like. They are completely different apps. The iPhone app does not have 90% of the features found in the iPad apps.

600MB, is too much? Hmmmmm how much space does iWork take up?
$99 a year subscription is for an Office 365 subscription. That includes the latest versions of Office for Mac, Office 2013 for Windows, 20GB of extra OneDrive space etc. Office 2014 for the Mac will be out shortly and would also be included in that as it will replace the current Office 2011 for the Mac. By reading many of these threads it sounds as though people are mistakenly thinking that the $99 subscription is just for the iPad version. Well it is not and it is actually a bargain when you look at the whole picture:

5 installs on either a Mac or Windows machine, AND 5 installs on a qualifying tablet (iPad, Surface, or other Windows based tablets- android coming soon)
so that basically comes out to $10 a device annually if you use all 5 desktop and tablet allocation. as for OneDrive you get 7GB free and the subscription adds 20GB additional space to bring it up to 27GB, which is quite a bit. iCloud gives you I believe 5GB free and and the additional 20 costs something like $50 a year.

You can download the Office for the iPad apps and view documents for free.
If you just have a Mac and one iPad, wait another few weeks and get the Office 365 Personal subscription of $6.99 a month or $70 a year. That will get you all the same features as the $99 version with the exception that it is good for just 1 desktop and 1 tablet as opposed to 5 desktop and 5 tablets.

Scott, I already knew all that. My issue is that I don't like MS Office. I prefer iWork. There are some places where iWork is better than MS Office, but there are also quite a few places where MS Office is more capable. Also the pricing you mention does not yet work. I've seen posts saying people who own office 365 are unable to log in to from their iThings so as of today things are a bit broken. I do believe MS intends to make Office work in iThings for users who subscribe to office 365 but as of today I believe it's still broken.

I got MS Office 2011 for $10 through a "home use" program at my job. I installed it for my wife and frankly I felt like I had paid $10 too much. She had iWork and LibreOffice and installing MS Office caused LibreOffice to stop working. I had to reinstall LibreOffice. Then there was activation. Then there were the half a dozen dock icons that showed up. When her HDD crashed, I accidentally on purpose "forgot" to reinstall MS Office and the DVD is down in the basement between the DVDs, 78 records and buggy whips where it belongs. So if I'm not willing to cough up $10, $99 is no kind of bargain no matter how many computers I'm allowed to infect ahem I mean install.

 

[ScottNWDW]

Scott, I already knew all that. My issue is that I don't like MS Office. I prefer iWork. There are some places where iWork is better than MS Office, but there are also quite a few places where MS Office is more capable. Also the pricing you mention does not yet work. I've seen posts saying people who own office 365 are unable to log in to from their iThings so as of today things are a bit broken. I do believe MS intends to make Office work in iThings for users who subscribe to office 365 but as of today I believe it's still broken.

I got MS Office 2011 for $10 through a "home use" program at my job. I installed it for my wife and frankly I felt like I had paid $10 too much. She had iWork and LibreOffice and installing MS Office caused LibreOffice to stop working. I had to reinstall LibreOffice. Then there was activation. Then there were the half a dozen dock icons that showed up. When her HDD crashed, I accidentally on purpose "forgot" to reinstall MS Office and the DVD is down in the basement between the DVDs, 78 records and buggy whips where it belongs. So if I'm not willing to cough up $10, $99 is no kind of bargain no matter how many computers I'm allowed to infect ahem I mean install.

You admitted that you don't like MS Office, so why are you even bothering? I paid $10 for the home use version of Office:mac 2011, but when Office 365 came out I deleted that copy and reinstalled with the Office:mac 2011 that comes with Office 365. I have had NO issues logging into Office on any of my iThings, MacBook or even my Gateway laptop which now has Office 2013 thanks to the Office 365 subscription.

I love iWork as well, but at the same time I also love Office since I had been using i a lot longer than iWork. In fact I was about to give up on Office until I heard that the iPad versions were coming. I was in the process of using iWork for just about everything and I was pleased with the results except for the fact that I couldn't do anything when I had to be on the Gateway laptop or do anything that involved stuff I needed to do for work.

Sorry to hear that you "lost" the HUP disc, but Office:mac 2011 is at the end of it's lifecycle and Office 2014 is due out sometime this year. If you have the Office 365 subscription you get that as part of it. Maybe it's time to reconsider rather than hunting for a disc in that sea of DVD's etc.

Microsoft does seem to be wanting to have parity across all platforms and at the moment I am quite happy with the way Office iPad apps are working and I also love that they released a Mac version of One Note. It really makes my Office experience a lot better and later this year when the new update for Mac comes out it should bring the Mac version in line a lot more with the Windows version.

 

[maflynn]

. I prefer iWork. There are some places where iWork is better than MS Office

I use mostly Numbers and I have to say the only place where that application was better then Excel was through cloud integration. Until MS released Office for the iPad that is.

Before Apple updated iWork recently (read gutted), it was a very capable suite, limited in function but still capable and it had some templates to create some really nice documents. With the upgrade, I could edit a spreadsheet on my Mac, iPad, and web very easily and this feature was huge for me. Yet with that ability Apple removed a large swarth of features making it a shell of its former functional self (at least for me).

With Office for the iPad and the office 365 subscription I can edit my documents on my Mac, iPad on the web and on my work PC. Plus they were able to keep all the power, functionality and flexibility of the applications.

To put it another way, MS was able to provide a cloud integration into their suite without removing features. See the difference, Apple removed features to get cloud integration, MS kept features.

I would rather use iWork but in all honesty its just much easier to use Excel, it has more functions, its easier for me enter data, formulas, and modify the spreadsheet. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to delete a column of data in Numbers and left the other columns slide to the left.

Do I want to pay 99 for this ability, not really but I'm getting cloud space that surpasses dropbox, Skype (though I have no use for that) and the ability to load office on 5 Macs and 5 iPads. I think taking that into consideration its money well spent.

I wish MS provided Access for its Mac customers that's I think the only major disappointment for me.

 

[r0k]

You admitted that you don't like MS Office, so why are you even bothering? I paid $10 for the home use version of Office:mac 2011, but when Office 365 came out I deleted that copy and reinstalled with the Office:mac 2011 that comes with Office 365. I have had NO issues logging into Office on any of my iThings, MacBook or even my Gateway laptop which now has Office 2013 thanks to the Office 365 subscription.

I love iWork as well, but at the same time I also love Office since I had been using i a lot longer than iWork. In fact I was about to give up on Office until I heard that the iPad versions were coming. I was in the process of using iWork for just about everything and I was pleased with the results except for the fact that I couldn't do anything when I had to be on the Gateway laptop or do anything that involved stuff I needed to do for work.

Sorry to hear that you "lost" the HUP disc, but Office:mac 2011 is at the end of it's lifecycle and Office 2014 is due out sometime this year. If you have the Office 365 subscription you get that as part of it. Maybe it's time to reconsider rather than hunting for a disc in that sea of DVD's etc.

Microsoft does seem to be wanting to have parity across all platforms and at the moment I am quite happy with the way Office iPad apps are working and I also love that they released a Mac version of One Note. It really makes my Office experience a lot better and later this year when the new update for Mac comes out it should bring the Mac version in line a lot more with the Windows version.

I know exactly where that DVD is. I just choose not to load it. I don't LIKE dealing with MS software (with very few exceptions) on my on time under my own roof. I do, however have the free version of OneNote installed on my iThings as well as my Macs. I also have Win XP and Win 7 sitting there in virtuaboxes for those times when some web developer stuck in 1999 insists on IE or flash to get something done. One example is NASA's 1998 Aircraft Design tutorial that we use for our scouts working on aviation merit badge. The thing is all done in Java and Flash and is a real headache to simply get to launch on a Mac when you consider 32 bit Chrome, 64 bit Java, Java 1.6 vs 1.7, oh what a headache!

I use mostly Numbers and I have to say the only place where that application was better then Excel was through cloud integration. Until MS released Office for the iPad that is.

Before Apple updated iWork recently (read gutted), it was a very capable suite, limited in function but still capable and it had some templates to create some really nice documents. With the upgrade, I could edit a spreadsheet on my Mac, iPad, and web very easily and this feature was huge for me. Yet with that ability Apple removed a large swarth of features making it a shell of its former functional self (at least for me).

With Office for the iPad and the office 365 subscription I can edit my documents on my Mac, iPad on the web and on my work PC. Plus they were able to keep all the power, functionality and flexibility of the applications.

To put it another way, MS was able to provide a cloud integration into their suite without removing features. See the difference, Apple removed features to get cloud integration, MS kept features.

I would rather use iWork but in all honesty its just much easier to use Excel, it has more functions, its easier for me enter data, formulas, and modify the spreadsheet. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to delete a column of data in Numbers and left the other columns slide to the left.

Do I want to pay 99 for this ability, not really but I'm getting cloud space that surpasses dropbox, Skype (though I have no use for that) and the ability to load office on 5 Macs and 5 iPads. I think taking that into consideration its money well spent.

I wish MS provided Access for its Mac customers that's I think the only major disappointment for me.

Apple has discontinued Bento and Filemaker is expensive. I definitely see the advantage of using Office 365. I've considered it myself as it's a lot better to log in with an email than to bother with all those key number and activation rituals. BTW, I still have Access 97 on my virtualboxes and it even runs directly in OSX under Crossover. I still don't NEED the current MS Office at home so that disk sits forgotten in the basement and I don't (yet) bother coughing up $99 a year for Office 365.

As for more cloud space, Google seems to be the best deal right now and frankly iCloud is the worst deal, or at least close to being worst. I'm paying upgrade fees on 3 of our 4 iCloud spaces. I got mine free for the first couple of years after mobile me went away but alas nowadays I cough up money annually to keep a mere 25 gig which is barely enough to back up my 32 GB iPhone and 32 GB iPad mini.

Please don't misunderstand, I know MS Office is capable. I just don't like the design philosophy that places flexibility above usability. I resent Apple's constant dumbing down of apps like mail.app and iWork but at least the apps are usable and Apple (mostly/often) picks the less critical stuff to hide/remove. The day might come when I finally cave and start using MS Office on my Mac but today is not that day.