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Microsoft Office for iPad Coming 'Sooner Than Most Think'
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Because I use Microsoft Office at work I was able to get Office for Mac at a very good price when I got my Mac Book Pro back in 2011. When I got the Mac I also bought iWork just because at the time I did not know I could get Office so cheap.
I purchased iWork for the iPad and iPhone when they came out and was happy using them on those devices. I started playing with iWork on my Mac. Sure there were some incompatibilities between the Mac and iDevices as well as between the Office and iWork. Nothing major though but annoying just the same.
After Apple updated iWork last fall that all changed. For me using iWork became seamless between all my devices. The recent update made it even more functional so much so that I haven't opened Office on my Mac now in months. I am even considering just taking the entire Office off my Mac. iWork has been doing everything I need for months now.
iWork is an extremely capable suite of Apps and does everything the average user would need. The ability to use it on virtually any device either through a native app or he online version is great. Office, not so much.
Microsoft is too late to the party if you ask me and it's a shame for a suite of apps that were ORIGINALLY made for the Mac. Everyone seems to forget that Excel, Word and PowerPoint were originally on the Mac long before they were on Windows. Now Microsoft treats the Mac like it's the red-headed stepchild.
I purchased iWork for the iPad and iPhone when they came out and was happy using them on those devices. I started playing with iWork on my Mac. Sure there were some incompatibilities between the Mac and iDevices as well as between the Office and iWork. Nothing major though but annoying just the same.
After Apple updated iWork last fall that all changed. For me using iWork became seamless between all my devices. The recent update made it even more functional so much so that I haven't opened Office on my Mac now in months. I am even considering just taking the entire Office off my Mac. iWork has been doing everything I need for months now.
iWork is an extremely capable suite of Apps and does everything the average user would need. The ability to use it on virtually any device either through a native app or he online version is great. Office, not so much.
Microsoft is too late to the party if you ask me and it's a shame for a suite of apps that were ORIGINALLY made for the Mac. Everyone seems to forget that Excel, Word and PowerPoint were originally on the Mac long before they were on Windows. Now Microsoft treats the Mac like it's the red-headed stepchild.
i would love to see office, but like most are saying it's about 2 years too late for anyone who was wanting to use an iPad with office has already found out alternatives
The majority large corporations (Microsoft's enterprise clients) will not allow their employees to use it, especially if tied to O365. Multinational corporations are subject to EAR and ITAR export restrictions which do not permit the electronic export of certain types of information without an export license or export designation. This means any information transmitted over the internet is technically considered an export since you have no control over how the information is routed across the globe or where the servers are located.
So that limits the potential market to consumers and small business that are ignorant of US and international export laws. So if MS ties O for iOS to an O365 subscription, what consumer would be willing to shell out their hard earned cash when there are so many free alternatives? For example iWork, Google Docs, LibreOffice for iPad (which also uses Google Docs). O for iOS/iPad will be DOA.
MS please stop trying to transform into a mobile company. You are not a mobile/portable hardware company. You are not a mobile OS company. You were asleep at the wheel when the mobile revolution happened and now you look like a headless chicken with no clear direction. Concentrate on your profitable enterprise customers and making your desktop applications better on Windows and Mac OS.
So that limits the potential market to consumers and small business that are ignorant of US and international export laws. So if MS ties O for iOS to an O365 subscription, what consumer would be willing to shell out their hard earned cash when there are so many free alternatives? For example iWork, Google Docs, LibreOffice for iPad (which also uses Google Docs). O for iOS/iPad will be DOA.
MS please stop trying to transform into a mobile company. You are not a mobile/portable hardware company. You are not a mobile OS company. You were asleep at the wheel when the mobile revolution happened and now you look like a headless chicken with no clear direction. Concentrate on your profitable enterprise customers and making your desktop applications better on Windows and Mac OS.
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I am now using iWork's (at least for the documents which I don't need to share with my colleagues or can export as PDF) and am loving it immensely.
For pages, it was a pleasant surprise to be able to insert an image and drag it around, while the text automatically reformats themselves around the pictures (something that always gave me fits in a Word).
I am also liking the templates in keynote which I find to be more elegant and better designed than PowerPoint.
Admitably, numbers is somewhat meh, but suffices for my needs, and you can't beat the convenience afforded by iCloud syncing.
And thanks to iWork's in the Cloud, I can present my work from any computer, even my Windows work laptop.
If Microsoft does ever get round to releasing office for iOS, I can't say I will rush to purchase it.
For pages, it was a pleasant surprise to be able to insert an image and drag it around, while the text automatically reformats themselves around the pictures (something that always gave me fits in a Word).
I am also liking the templates in keynote which I find to be more elegant and better designed than PowerPoint.
Admitably, numbers is somewhat meh, but suffices for my needs, and you can't beat the convenience afforded by iCloud syncing.
And thanks to iWork's in the Cloud, I can present my work from any computer, even my Windows work laptop.
If Microsoft does ever get round to releasing office for iOS, I can't say I will rush to purchase it.
Microsoft is a platform company defending an operation system monopoly. They couldn't care less about software or hardware, all they care about is dominance. With Android as a free alternative, you can't have paid-for Windows as a big player in mobile. Doing Surface hardware is a way for Microsoft to get paid at all and bundling Office with Surface is a way to create consumer interest in Surface. If it fails, than Windows has failed as a tablet OS.
The Office experience is going to be very different on an iPad. This is a touch device, so I can't imagine a ribbon or some of the other elements that essentially require a mouse. Once you strip that stuff away, you probably end up with something that looks a lot like iWork's.......so what's the point.
Compatibility with desktop Office? Don't count on it.
BTW - You can convert an iWorks file to Office. Of course, you will run into compatibility issues also. So, if I know I need to convert a document (which is becoming less and less frequent), I just keep the formatting to a minimum in the iWork draft document and add the bells and whistles at the end after converting the file.
Compatibility with desktop Office? Don't count on it.
BTW - You can convert an iWorks file to Office. Of course, you will run into compatibility issues also. So, if I know I need to convert a document (which is becoming less and less frequent), I just keep the formatting to a minimum in the iWork draft document and add the bells and whistles at the end after converting the file.
There is no competition between Excel and Numbers. The reason I got an Office 365 subscription was because of the last release of iWork. Numbers, as it is today, is a joke and when I need to get real work done I do it in Excel.
Word processing and presentations are more personal choice but spreadsheets make Office a no brainer. That, and I don't see any difference between iCloud syncing and OneDrive when it comes to documents.
I'm sure it will sell great but while iWork does not have the range of functionality of Office, I can imagine that plenty of people found out that they don't even need that range of functionality for their office app needs. The longer MS take the more people will get away from the brainless "I use MS office because everyone does" mentality.
If it is a stand alone, one price deal - Yay! 
If it is a subscription, annual price deal - Nay!
If it is a subscription, annual price deal - Nay!
I don't think my higher ups would care, I don't work in the software industry. Want to stop the nonsense already?
Oh, and the right way to say it is BAD productivity software is free with the OS.
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This is not correct. It is exactly those large enterprises that are flocking to Office 365. And we do exchange information using it over national boundaries regularly with zero legal issues. And it is stuff like LibreOffice and especially Google Docs that a lot of large IT units have banned from their enterprises because of the huge security issues.
You need to take off your ABM colored glasses and look at the real world where people who need to be productive want the best of breed. And that (whether you like it or not) is Office.
Well I can't speak for others but we've banned O365 from our multinational corporation. We found it to be buggy, prone to being offline at exactly the worst moment, and unstable. That it stored data on servers we couldn't control located overseas who knows where, with security we can't verify, was just the last straw. We've even laid in copies of Office2010 because with 2013 we can't be sure it will not keep copies on the cloud. Once those are all deployed w'll hopefully have a replacement, likely not from MS.
Actually, it was on my iPhone, and I think it had to do with navigation, the lock screen, and Siri. If I do something very quickly involving one of those, the keyboard occasionally glitches out.
We recently bought full version office 2013 licenses at work. We don't want stinkin subscriptions.
Great hand, badly misplayed
you're right that it's a huge card in their hand, but the way most card games work is that if you have a great card but DON'T PLAY IT until the game is over, it doesn't help. and Microsoft has held onto that card WAY too long...
they are the most successful software company in the history of the planet, and had an office suite with almost total ubiquity. failing to release it on the iPad early on was a huge mistake on their part. they were trying to hurt apple (always a weird move in business) and wound up hurting themselves.
if they'd released Office on iPad early on, it may have become the standard on tablets and mobile, and made it hard for anyone else to enter the market, just like with PCs. but now that they've waited, everyone has gotten used to NOT having it, and no one really cares anymore. now, unless it's totally free and WAY better, it will get a huge, collective MEH from the tablet world.
they remind me of Gollum, sitting alone, petting their office suite with their cold slimy hands and whispering "my Precious" into the darkness...
you're right that it's a huge card in their hand, but the way most card games work is that if you have a great card but DON'T PLAY IT until the game is over, it doesn't help. and Microsoft has held onto that card WAY too long...
they are the most successful software company in the history of the planet, and had an office suite with almost total ubiquity. failing to release it on the iPad early on was a huge mistake on their part. they were trying to hurt apple (always a weird move in business) and wound up hurting themselves.
if they'd released Office on iPad early on, it may have become the standard on tablets and mobile, and made it hard for anyone else to enter the market, just like with PCs. but now that they've waited, everyone has gotten used to NOT having it, and no one really cares anymore. now, unless it's totally free and WAY better, it will get a huge, collective MEH from the tablet world.
they remind me of Gollum, sitting alone, petting their office suite with their cold slimy hands and whispering "my Precious" into the darkness...
That´s why they try to break loose with the standalone Office. Everything online, monthly/yearly subscriptions, you only need to update the backend to include new features.
If they´ll release Office for iPad, it´s not going to be a standalone version, you can count on that.
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Large enterprises have some sense of security and they won´t ever allow Office 365 to be used on such a broad scale.
Not sure why you would allow Office 365 and not Google Docs, as they´re both technically Cloud-based services.
Large corporations still have to deal with standalone licences, but also have a minority of their travelling workers use Office 365 for convenience sake, but they won´t allow Office 365 on a broad scale like that.
You would almost commit a crime of you take the documents of your partner companies and upload them to MS without letting them know, especially if you work for big law firms and associated companies.
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Office 365 is cloud based in the same way Creative Cloud is, which is...not really all that cloud based. When you subscribe to it, you're more or less getting a month to month license for Office 2013 along with a whole bunch of
That´s certainly true, but if you want to share (and that´s what he talked about) you need to use some online drive, which - in this case - is called SkyDrive/OneDrive. And that´s where the problem really begins. Otherwise it wouldn´t make much sense to use Office 365 and just go with the standalone applications, because sharing across organizations would then work via SSL-VPN/dial-up access to their intranet.
I haven't played with 365 much myself, but I think that's entirely optional. Like you can still do normal collaboration projects the same as before, but now you have an option to Save to Skydrive.
As for Skydrive itself, it's no worse than saving to iCloud or Dropbox. It's not something I'd use for sensitive documents and materials, but for most anything else, it's fine.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/b...-stories-office-testimonials-FX103045622.aspx
There are some very large multinational corporations like ABB who are migrating to it (140K employees). I'm not really sure I would say "flocking" but you'll find a few notable names, and those are just the businesses who are willing to put their name out there.
I gave up on Office on the iPad a long time ago, but Office is so engrained my workday I ended up ditching the iPad instead.
Yes, usage of the drive is optional, but the problem is that you have to do some preparations for Office 365 to work correctly, otherwise (like I added above) there would be no need to even buy it in the first place.
Exactly. And for big legal firms or companies who have a sense of IT security, this is a no-go. That´s why you usually use VPN dial-up access, where firewalls often times even forbid you to copy files out of the intranet, but only give you a workable copy while connected, called data leakage prevention.
That´s a decision based process, where management decides if the risk is worth it, also due to MS giving incentives to go Office 365 (and if a company has a lot of workers abroad all the time), but I wouldn´t even for a second consider that to be the norm, nor would I break the chain of trust when you partner with a lot of other companies, where data security is important.
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