Microsoft Office for iPad Coming 'Sooner Than Most Think'

[timber]

I use Excel every single day and need its features namely Macros and Pivot tables among others.

But I am certain that on the iPad it would be more or less as featureless as iWork. MS has 2 choices, or they shoehorn the current Office on the iPad and it will have a terrible interface or they will have to dumb it down just like iWork. I don't like any of the alternatives.

Of course they can came up with something amazing. I won't hold my breath.

And I won't certainly pay any subscription. One time sale or nothing.

I have used Numbers on the iPad. It's a bit limited but it's pretty good for something that must work only with fingers. And I just love using the iPad compared to laptops so I have high tolerance.

 

[Parasprite]

umm, I don't get it..

I purchased an iPad Air at Christmas for the family to use and
I just can't stand using that silly keyboard for typing, maybe it's just me.

It's great for using apps etc, but it'll never replace my MacBook Pro.

I find it easier to type than on a keyboard, although I can't really explain why. Especially confusing to me since I already type at 70-80 wpm (like enough similar on the iPad).

I would say that it had something to do with autocorrect, but I end up typing too many nonstandard, technical, uncommon, and internety words for it to be consistently useful.

 

[Joelist]

Sorry guys but Office was and is the gold standard for Productivity software. And contrary to some "assertions" people have not moved on from it at all. Office 365 has been a monster hit and companies and professionals have in fact been dropping garbage like Google Docs like hotcakes especially after it became clear that Google is indeed spying on users.

iWork is not usable productivity software as evidenced by the vast majority of Mac users who need Productivity wind up just buying Office for Mac. That is part of why iWork became free - most did not consider it worth paying anything for. And other "solutions" like OpenOffice are flat out crud.

Office for iOS will be here this year. Not years down the road. And yes Office Mac 2014 is also coming - remember Microsoft follows a "tick tock" with Office where Office Mac follows Office by a year.

 

[ricosuave]

Sorry guys but Office was and is the gold standard for Productivity software. And contrary to some "assertions" people have not moved on from it at all. Office 365 has been a monster hit and companies and professionals have in fact been dropping garbage like Google Docs like hotcakes especially after it became clear that Google is indeed spying on users.

iWork is not usable productivity software as evidenced by the vast majority of Mac users who need Productivity wind up just buying Office for Mac. That is part of why iWork became free - most did not consider it worth paying anything for. And other "solutions" like OpenOffice are flat out crud.

Office for iOS will be here this year. Not years down the road. And yes Office Mac 2014 is also coming - remember Microsoft follows a "tick tock" with Office where Office Mac follows Office by a year.

Welcome to MacRumors. How has your company changed since Satya Nadella took over?

 

[LastQuadrant]

I thought Microsoft was going to release this a year ago.

 

[olowott]

in other words, please don't even think about it

 

[Benjamins]

Office will become a subscription service.
Fortunately I don't use it for almost anything.

 

[NT1440]

Will this be the end of the hilariously self defeating "it comes with office***" campaign MS has been playing for their (and their partners) tablets?

 

[Parasprite]

I wouldn't complain if I could get 5-10 tabs open with no reloading. 2 or 3 is not a premium experience. I've had Safari crash with one page open, but I've had no better luck with Chrome either. I'm really hoping it isn't a hardware issue, ie, lack of RAM. 1GB in 2014 is sparse no matter how you look at it. I would have rather paid an extra $4 and had 2GB.

It's not a lack of RAM per se, at least not always. There is some crashing (particularly with apps) that are low memory errors, but most Safari crashes on A7 iDevices seem to not have much correlation with high memory usage.

It helps if you:

1. Note websites or actions that crash often, and avoid them if possible.
2. Copy text that you are typing before changing tabs, just in case it crashes or reloads.
3. Avoid scrolling too fast or too abruptly, especially when the page is still loading.

It really is baffling how much we have to go through...

 

[Analog Kid]

Too little, too late.

Initially, when I thought MS was interested in making money, I thought it would have come years ago. Then, when I realized MS is two wrapped up in their own groupthink to care about profits, I thought it would never come. Now, I simply don't care.

 

[AppleScruff1]

It's not a lack of RAM per se, at least not always. There is some crashing (particularly with apps) that are low memory errors, but most Safari crashes on A7 iDevices seem to not have much correlation with high memory usage.

It helps if you:

1. Note websites or actions that crash often, and avoid them if possible.
2. Copy text that you are typing before changing tabs, just in case it crashes or reloads.
3. Avoid scrolling too fast or too abruptly, especially when the page is still loading.

It really is baffling how much we have to go through...

I shouldn't have to do any of that to enjoy the supposed best tablet on the planet. It is annoying and disappointing. I just hope they fix it. Soon.

 

[Analog Kid]

Sorry guys but Office was and is the gold standard for Productivity software. And contrary to some "assertions" people have not moved on from it at all. Office 365 has been a monster hit and companies and professionals have in fact been dropping garbage like Google Docs like hotcakes especially after it became clear that Google is indeed spying on users.

iWork is not usable productivity software as evidenced by the vast majority of Mac users who need Productivity wind up just buying Office for Mac. That is part of why iWork became free - most did not consider it worth paying anything for. And other "solutions" like OpenOffice are flat out crud.

Office for iOS will be here this year. Not years down the road. And yes Office Mac 2014 is also coming - remember Microsoft follows a "tick tock" with Office where Office Mac follows Office by a year.

Actually Office is the legacy standard for Productivity software. It's like jpeg-- crappy quality, but everyone can view it. I'm not sure there is a gold standard currently-- everything out there seems pretty weak in one way or another.

Personally, I find Word completely unusable, so I don't use it except to open other people's attachments. I use Pages, which I also wouldn't call gold mainly because it doesn't handle enormous documents well-- it's just better than everything else except the previous version of Pages.

PowerPoint is inscrutable and awkward, so I use Keynote (5) for my work. I think Keynote 5 was great for what it does. It could certainly be improved to make it easier to construct complex builds, but it's easy to do 90% of what I need. I'd call Keynote at least silver. Maybe white gold.

As easy as it seems to outperform Excel, however, nobody has so Excel still has its place. This is really the only reason I own Office. Everything else I could just open in iWork to view, if I needed to. Excel is certainly not gold though, it's merely exceeds the very low aggregate standard set by everything else. It's maybe wrought iron. It's an ugly tool that can be brute forced into utility. Excel for Mac seems to be intentionally difficult to use compared to its Windows counterpart, which I find stupid.

None of these desktop applications are needed on iPad. iWork is actually scaled much better for the types of work I'd do on a tablet.

 

[Parasprite]

I shouldn't have to do any of that to enjoy the supposed best tablet on the planet. It is annoying and disappointing. I just hope they fix it. Soon.

No kidding. It's better to minimize the annoyances for now, at least. Only predictable improvement has had to do with scrolling, the rest is just damage control.

----------

Excel for Mac seems to be intentionally difficult to use compared to its Windows counterpart, which I find stupid.

Most of Office on Mac seems to be intentionally difficult to use, at least they dropped the awkward not-exactly-Macish-not-exactly-Windowsish interface they had in 2008 though.

 

[kerrikins]

You remote control into your laptop? Did you graduate from the Rube Goldberg school of business?

No one is hating here. The collective consensus is that MS missed the boat. People have moved on to iWork and other solutions. And Office does not help the (business) world go round. Any business can choose a number of office apps. But MS has businesses convinced they have to use MS.

Do yourself a favor... http://www.apple.com/ios/pages/

It's not as simple as snapping your fingers to go from Microsoft to iOS, though, particularly when you're talking about big businesses. That's why the other person was saying that it makes the business world go round. A lot of businesses would rather work with what they know than go through the effort of making sure that they can get new software compatible with their existing systems.

 

[b166er]

Is it just me, or shouldn't Office have been available for iPad for a few years now? I use Pages for personal/school stuff and Office at work, so I'm kind of indifferent. It just shocks me that it would take this long. Is MS still debating weather or not it's worth it? It reminds me of how Facebook wouldn't put out an iPad app for the longest time for no real good reason.

 

[Crosslad]

Sorry guys but Office was and is the gold standard for Productivity software. And contrary to some "assertions" people have not moved on from it at all. Office 365 has been a monster hit and companies and professionals have in fact been dropping garbage like Google Docs like hotcakes especially after it became clear that Google is indeed spying on users.

iWork is not usable productivity software as evidenced by the vast majority of Mac users who need Productivity wind up just buying Office for Mac. That is part of why iWork became free - most did not consider it worth paying anything for. And other "solutions" like OpenOffice are flat out crud.

Office for iOS will be here this year. Not years down the road. And yes Office Mac 2014 is also coming - remember Microsoft follows a "tick tock" with Office where Office Mac follows Office by a year.

Admittedly iwork cannot do pivot tables and macros, but I regularly use a spreadsheet at work that has 12worksheets, 1500 rows on some worksheets, multiple charts on other worksheets and Numbers imports it fantastically. I can edit it and email it back to my work pc without any problems at all. Numbers handles this spreadsheet better than any other office suite on my ipad or my samsung tablet and I have tried several office suites. As for home use it easily handles any task I can think of. The same is true for Pages and Keynote. The iWork suite was fantastic value when I bought it and is even better value now it come free with new iOS devices. Is it as powerful as Office? - no. Would I pay £100 per year to have Office 365 on my ipad? - definitely not.

 

[Thares]

Who cares, we all ready have iWork.

I disagree.

iWorks on my iPad Air is almost useless if I don't have the iWork stuff for Mac. And even if you got it for Mac it's far away from being any real competition to Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

 

[KPOM]

Office is a huge card in Microsofts hand. Releasing Office for iPad is going to hurt them. One less reason to buy a surface.

Or it could just be a recognition that the potential revenues and profits for Office for iPad outweigh lost sales of the Surface. I assume they'd also release Office for Android if current market trends continue.

Think about it. Apple selling 26 million iPads last quarter was a "meh." Microsoft selling maybe 1.5 million Surfaces (they just broke out revenues, not device sales) was "double the quarter before" and a "home run." Microsoft is leaving money on the table the longer they delay Office for iPad and Android.

 

[69650]

Subscription only would be deal breaker for me. I'm not willing to pay £8/month for Office 365 when I can get iWork for free. Ok it doesn't have the same level of functionality but I only use Office so that I can send email attachments in Word format. As you can open and save Pages files to Word format I don't even need that now and I really like the fact that I can open my iWork documents using iCloud on any of my Apple devices.

 

[KPOM]

I disagree.

iWorks on my iPad Air is almost useless if I don't have the iWork stuff for Mac. And even if you got it for Mac it's far away from being any real competition to Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

It's still good for reading and making basic edits to e-mail attachments since it can import and export Office document. That said, Numbers isn't particularly sophisticated, and complicated Word and PowerPoint files can also cause issues.

I like Pages because I can read tracked changes and comments.

 

[HenryDJP]

Same. I'm shocked at how poorly Numbers handles graphs. It's pretty much unusable if I want a single graph.

Have you tried Numbers since it was recently updated? Suppose to have a lot more functionality and be very compatible with Excel.

 

[KPOM]

As easy as it seems to outperform Excel, however, nobody has so Excel still has its place. This is really the only reason I own Office. Everything else I could just open in iWork to view, if I needed to. Excel is certainly not gold though, it's merely exceeds the very low aggregate standard set by everything else. It's maybe wrought iron. It's an ugly tool that can be brute forced into utility. Excel for Mac seems to be intentionally difficult to use compared to its Windows counterpart, which I find stupid.

None of these desktop applications are needed on iPad. iWork is actually scaled much better for the types of work I'd do on a tablet.

True, but maintaining file integrity can be an issue with iWork. I don't care that Numbers can't handle pivot tables or complex formulas, but it would be better if it could preserve those features while letting me make other changes. That's where an Office for iPad could come in handy, provided Microsoft doesn't screw up with an expensive subscription only model or bundling approach. I could see paying $40 or possibly even $50 for standalone versions of Word and Excel for iPad that could read and make basic edits while preserving files. They could use in-app purchasing for more advanced functions for people who want them.

 

[kerrikins]

Subscription only would be deal breaker for me. I'm not willing to pay £8/month for Office 365 when I can get iWork for free. Ok it doesn't have the same level of functionality but I only use Office so that I can send email attachments in Word format. As you can open and save Pages files to Word format I don't even need that now and I really like the fact that I can open my iWork documents using iCloud on any of my Apple devices.

And this is exactly why Apple giving away iWork was such a genius move.... It does wonders to ease the path for people to switch from their other devices to Apple when they don't have to worry about buying a whole other software system.

Microsoft moving in this direction is still a good idea, though, because there will be some - not all, but some - users who are willing to pay to carry over what they're used to.

 

[jrcolonial98]

Office is a huge card in Microsofts hand. Releasing Office for iPad is going to hurt them. One less reason to buy a surface.

I think they'll get more sales from Office for iOS than from the few extra Surface sales driven by having Office on them.

 

[tomtendo]

At my company, we've adopted Google Apps. We use Docs, Spreadsheets all day. Microsoft Office is old technology. They need to revamp it and give it away from free...