This is great news. I know a lot of people, myself included, that bring their iPad to meetings instead of a laptop. Being able to show a PowerPoint, Excel, or Word document seamlessly would be a huge boon for corporate adoption.
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Microsoft Office on iPad Spotted, Coming Soon to App Store
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Very interesting, given MS's stated intent to enter the tablet world with Windows 8. If Office were Windows 8 exclusive, that would be a huge incentive for customers to buy Windows tablets instead of iPads.
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Exactly.
Because I am so used to Excel. Moving from Word to Pages is easy because I never used many of the mid-level, much less high-end functions. But with Excel, I do use many of the mid-level functions and use them often. I don't really want to take the time to learn them again or maybe have to learn a different way to do things. Plus I don't usually share Word/Pages documents except as .pdf's, I do share Excel spreadsheets.
I don't know about that. My own experiences with MS Office have been more similar to his. Two versions of Office (which ostensibly use the same format), on identical PCs, gave us all sorts of problems where document changes caused issues going between either system. Getting all of the systems updated to the same (newer) version fixed *most* of the issues, but not all. In fact, even setting up the PCs with the same default printer, using the same version of the printer driver didn't fix all of the issues. (Eventually keeping the two systems in sync so far as patches and service packs did the job.)
The most reliable way to open an MS Office file is to use LibreOffice. It will properly open files which MS Office claims are corrupt or invalid, and saving those files in an MS Office format within LibreOffice will render them usable by MS Office again. That behavior relates largely to the history of MS Office being a binary memory dump format. LibreOffice had to reverse engineer the format, which means they found and dealt with oddities which MS Office assumes are impossible and borks on.
Office was always a huge cash cow for them. If it wasn't they wouldn't have made an OS X version (let alone the classic versions). What is odd is that they are doing this for iOS before Android. They get money from when Android devices are sold. But yeah, it does kind of take the wind out of the whole "and Windows 8 tablets run Office" line since that seems to be their main marketing push.
If this is true, i'll definitively get an iPad and Word, no offence, but Pages sucks. (And I'd really love some competition here, Apple. hint hint.)
who's to say that this isn't more of a "watered-down" office version for the iPad with the full functionlity being reserved for the windows 8 tablet?
Either way, if this runs ppt. better than keynote (not that I have any experience with it, just going off of reviews) that will be huge huge huge. I'm afreaid that if they were taking orders for the iPad 3 right now, I'd have already put one in.
Either way, if this runs ppt. better than keynote (not that I have any experience with it, just going off of reviews) that will be huge huge huge. I'm afreaid that if they were taking orders for the iPad 3 right now, I'd have already put one in.
Looks like this is a classic example of "if you can't beat them, join them," which is an improvement over the typical MS practice of "if you can't beat them, copy them." 
Smart choice on the part of Ballmer & Co. Some money is better than no money. Some money? Or No money?
Smart choice on the part of Ballmer & Co. Some money is better than no money. Some money? Or No money?
On second glance, as we sure that it's not a Windows 8 version of Office? that settings button looks rather Metro Charms-ish.
From Microsoft? Without them being able to charge you again for every new release? Not a chance. $29 each component for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, or $59 for the set.
This makes me happy.
I use my iPad extensively for work. I'm quite productive on it. And though I only create documents in Word on my Mac if I have to, I receive a lot of Word documents from others, often with complex tables and other formatting that gets completely destroyed when I try to open/view it in anything else like Pages for iOS, Docs to Go, GoodReader and the built-in viewer.
What works great is opening the file in Adobe PDF Creator on my iPad (or iPhone) and having Adobe's servers convert the document - it does a superior job at maintaining near-perfect formatting of complex documents, allowing me to view them intact on my iPad. The drawback, of course, is that they're PDFs and therefore essentially uneditable.
Word on my iPad would be a godsend. Not necessarily that I want to use it, but in that it'll let me have easier access to (and editing of) stuff other people send me.
I'd probably pay up to $50 for MS Office for the iPad - presuming it maintained complete file compatibility and had a significant feature subset of the PC/Mac versions.
I use my iPad extensively for work. I'm quite productive on it. And though I only create documents in Word on my Mac if I have to, I receive a lot of Word documents from others, often with complex tables and other formatting that gets completely destroyed when I try to open/view it in anything else like Pages for iOS, Docs to Go, GoodReader and the built-in viewer.
What works great is opening the file in Adobe PDF Creator on my iPad (or iPhone) and having Adobe's servers convert the document - it does a superior job at maintaining near-perfect formatting of complex documents, allowing me to view them intact on my iPad. The drawback, of course, is that they're PDFs and therefore essentially uneditable.
Word on my iPad would be a godsend. Not necessarily that I want to use it, but in that it'll let me have easier access to (and editing of) stuff other people send me.
I'd probably pay up to $50 for MS Office for the iPad - presuming it maintained complete file compatibility and had a significant feature subset of the PC/Mac versions.
I'm betting they're "supporting role" apps for the desktop version with very little real capabilities.
I honestly don't know how this is anything other than good news. There is a considerable demand for a native iPad iOS version as is clear by the success of other office suites and onlive desktop, cloudon. This will at least offer a full touch tailored experience.
This would be my concern, too. I would expect sales & reviews to be poor if they wimped out. And at least we know Microsoft wants sales.
Either that, or a poor subset of iPad features would force everyone (even on PCs and Macs) to mainly stick to iPad-compatible features... thus reducing everyone's reliance on MS Office... thus making the world a better place.
I'd love to see AOE3 on the iPad... Sadly, I think it's fairly low down the priority list for MS!
Who would have thunk that the day would come where Microsoft "rushes" to make a product compatible with an Apple device.
I agree. Just remember that Microsoft used to hold a big chunk of Apple shares (non-voting) - it was not only competition but also an investment. Since their investment, Apple is MS Windows compatible and you can install it on Macs. They were the ones who helped saving Apple at the time SJ came back. Also, MS Office was first on Macs before it went to the IBM PCs.
I'll check it out. If it works well, I will buy it. I used iWorks so far, but I want to have more compatibility with MS Office products. In my work environment, MS Office is the standard.