Office for iPad is not meant to be a primary installation of the software. The idea is that 99% of the people who install it already have it installed somewhere else and are using existing 365 subscriptions to use the iPad version. Office for iPad is just an additional reason to go over to the 365 subscription model, not the primary one.
That is of course after Microsoft has converted most of the Office user base over to the subscription model, of course. I am well aware that there is a huge user base still not on that model. The new Mac version of Office will follow the subscription model. If you don't have Office installed somewhere else using a 365 subscription then you probably aren't all that interested in having Office on your iPad anyway, as the majority reaction to this thread has shown.
The advantage to the subscritpion model is that you can install and use many instances of the software in a cross platform format without having to have a separate license for each one. The incremental cost of Office on iPad for a current 365 subscriber is $0.00. Unsure how the 365 subscriptions work for corporate customers, though, but if they are volume licensed subscriptions, could one not just log in with the employer's corporate login and not have to pay for a home use license at all?
That all being said, as the CFO of my small company, we have moved over to iWork completely, and have only old legacy files still on the MS platform. The only use case we have left that cannot be done is pivot tables we need for a couple of KPI reports we need to do. And we do a lot of complicated spreadsheets. Using Numbers requires one to rethink the workflow so in the beginning you have to be open to change, because it is based on objects rather than endless tabbed tables as in Excel. A very fundamentally different take on things, but easily just as effective once you get used to it. Now all our spreadsheet work is done on easier to navigate and understand formats that are also coincidentally much nicer to look at!
We do still have one Board Member who has stuck to MS - I semd him HTML or PDF versions of the reports instead, and if he asks for data he can play with I export him an excel file, and his only comment is why we can't make it look as good in Excel/Powerpoint as we do in Numbers/Keynote.
That is of course after Microsoft has converted most of the Office user base over to the subscription model, of course. I am well aware that there is a huge user base still not on that model. The new Mac version of Office will follow the subscription model. If you don't have Office installed somewhere else using a 365 subscription then you probably aren't all that interested in having Office on your iPad anyway, as the majority reaction to this thread has shown.
The advantage to the subscritpion model is that you can install and use many instances of the software in a cross platform format without having to have a separate license for each one. The incremental cost of Office on iPad for a current 365 subscriber is $0.00. Unsure how the 365 subscriptions work for corporate customers, though, but if they are volume licensed subscriptions, could one not just log in with the employer's corporate login and not have to pay for a home use license at all?
That all being said, as the CFO of my small company, we have moved over to iWork completely, and have only old legacy files still on the MS platform. The only use case we have left that cannot be done is pivot tables we need for a couple of KPI reports we need to do. And we do a lot of complicated spreadsheets. Using Numbers requires one to rethink the workflow so in the beginning you have to be open to change, because it is based on objects rather than endless tabbed tables as in Excel. A very fundamentally different take on things, but easily just as effective once you get used to it. Now all our spreadsheet work is done on easier to navigate and understand formats that are also coincidentally much nicer to look at!
We do still have one Board Member who has stuck to MS - I semd him HTML or PDF versions of the reports instead, and if he asks for data he can play with I export him an excel file, and his only comment is why we can't make it look as good in Excel/Powerpoint as we do in Numbers/Keynote.
