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Microsoft Reportedly 'Actively Working' on Office for iPad and Mac App Store
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Nothing really. Unless Excel for iPad is as good as Excel for Mac, iWork is superior. On the Mac, iWork is the best except for Numbers (like Excel), which is worse than Excel.
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Yeah, a Windows tablet would never fly. Windows users are either old-style computer people (who don't use tablets), gamers (who don't use tablets), or Microsoft fans (who don't know how to use tablets).
Who cares? It's all about MS Office in the business community.
iWork in the corporate world... LOL
Who cares? It's all about MS Office in the business community.
iWork in the corporate world... LOL
Keynote kills, and people don't really judge your presentations on what you used to make them. As far as they know, you're just really good with Powerpoint if you're using Keynote. The only reason the business community doesn't use it yet is because they have been using Office for a long time, and iWork is new. I'd keep my business on iWork to prevent losing my files randomly to the stupidity of Office (except for Excel).
Plus, it can open Powerpoint files easily, and it can export to the Quicktime with links format for computers that don't have it (which runs as if it were on Keynote but in QT Player).
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Pages: More stable and easier than Word, lacks a few rarely used features; I use it
Keynote: Completely kills Powerpoint in features, ease, and stability
Numbers: More stable and easier than Excel, but only has simple features (lame), so I don't use it
Mail: Makes Outlook completely pointless
May be it will have the impossible to duplicate filters
that seem to be missing from all the IOS apps.Showing presentations is OK with either PowerPoint or Keynote. But sharing presentation is a mess with Keynote.
The exporting/importing of Keynote to PowerPoint is far from usable. And having to use Quicktime for seeing a presentation is not going to happen in a business.
Same goes with Pages. It is a very nice word processor, but nothing beats being able to share documents and being 100% sure what the other people see is exactly what you see.
And Number don't even get me started. It is deficient even as a simple spreadsheet.
Well, I'm sure MS would allow Dropbox integration, unlike Apple with their iWork iPad apps. That'd be enough for me to buy it.
Well, before a business actually uses iWork they would have to adopt the mac platform first. (Won't happen in my lifetime).
Who the hell wants to convert their presentations to QT movies? And what windows person want to actually play them?
I haven't had any Office 2011 app lock up, spit, stutter or crash on me since it came out. Ironically, Lion is the most fickle piece of software I use these days.
Don't get me wrong... iWork is fine for a student or the mom who wants to make up a quick garage sale flier but it isn't intended to compete with MS Office in the business world where document exchange is a part of every day life.
MS Excel
MS has always kept Excel for the Mac better than all other Mac spreadsheet programs. I know because I kept purchasing them in hopes of finding something better. But it has never happened. This means starting back in 1985 until the current version.
I don't really use PowerPoint or KeyNote for anything other that those times that I go back to school. My wife uses Pages on our Mac to make all of our birthday & those kinds of cards. It does a nice job. Word would be used for anything very big. Plus we need to be compatable with our customers. Numbers for the Mac is a joke program for our company. We do accounting work & income tax prep. 20 years ago I wrote my income tax prep program using the Mac. It actually started with the NE state forms in 1985 or 86 followed later for the federal. Some can get by with Numbers. To me that means that they are a very light spreadsheet user. That is not our way of using a spreadsheet.
Even being a light Pages user I would be afraid to do any mission critical work in Pages, let alone Numbers. If Apple is serious about anything other than KeyNote where are the Mac upgrades. All we have seen for many years now are a writing for the iOS & updates there. Because Numbers was only started but nothing corrected or added to make it usable as a spreadsheet program. I have held off purchasing any other the iWork pieces for our iToys. Namely an iPad for this type of work.
It would be nice is MS would make something for Excel on our many iToys. I'd like to be able to more closely use our MS Excel programs with our iPads. Maybe its this lack of really being able to do our normal spreadsheet work on our iPad is the reason that for the time being I will call them iToys. The worst part is that other than the printing of income tax form pages all of the other formulas are ones that can be found in our old Palm PDAs.
I'm hoping that MS can help us with a real spreadsheet program on the iPad. We own about 3 of them now & they all work a little but they seem to lack a lot. It seems strange asking MS to help. But they have in the past with MS Excel!
MS has always kept Excel for the Mac better than all other Mac spreadsheet programs. I know because I kept purchasing them in hopes of finding something better. But it has never happened. This means starting back in 1985 until the current version.
I don't really use PowerPoint or KeyNote for anything other that those times that I go back to school. My wife uses Pages on our Mac to make all of our birthday & those kinds of cards. It does a nice job. Word would be used for anything very big. Plus we need to be compatable with our customers. Numbers for the Mac is a joke program for our company. We do accounting work & income tax prep. 20 years ago I wrote my income tax prep program using the Mac. It actually started with the NE state forms in 1985 or 86 followed later for the federal. Some can get by with Numbers. To me that means that they are a very light spreadsheet user. That is not our way of using a spreadsheet.
Even being a light Pages user I would be afraid to do any mission critical work in Pages, let alone Numbers. If Apple is serious about anything other than KeyNote where are the Mac upgrades. All we have seen for many years now are a writing for the iOS & updates there. Because Numbers was only started but nothing corrected or added to make it usable as a spreadsheet program. I have held off purchasing any other the iWork pieces for our iToys. Namely an iPad for this type of work.
It would be nice is MS would make something for Excel on our many iToys. I'd like to be able to more closely use our MS Excel programs with our iPads. Maybe its this lack of really being able to do our normal spreadsheet work on our iPad is the reason that for the time being I will call them iToys. The worst part is that other than the printing of income tax form pages all of the other formulas are ones that can be found in our old Palm PDAs.
I'm hoping that MS can help us with a real spreadsheet program on the iPad. We own about 3 of them now & they all work a little but they seem to lack a lot. It seems strange asking MS to help. But they have in the past with MS Excel!
Well, in my experience when it comes to presentations, sharing is almost universally done in PDF format, not the native file. The exception is sharing among people who are working on a presentation together. Then, of course you would choose one piece of software and stick with it. That's just common sense, regardless of whether you're working on a presentation, a word processor document, a CAD design, etc. (Not that common sense is necessarily all that common.) As for it being "ok" in either Keynote or PowerPoint, I can tell you that I have been at presentation evenings where I was one of about a dozen presentations, mine was the only one done with Keynote, all the others were PP, and I was complimented left and right for the elegance of the presentation. I can't tell you how many times I heard things like "I didn't know that PowerPoint could do that..." I stand firmly in the camp of Keynote beats PowerPoint hands down.
As for Pages, it really depends on what you want to do with it. I have passed simple Word documents back and forth, using Pages at my end and Word at the other end(s), and rarely ever had a problem. I've even used the change tracking feature in Pages in such instances, and it seems to integrate perfectly with the same feature in Word. I would agree that Pages is missing a some strength in a few features, but it is much stronger in some other areas.
Spreadsheets, well, nothing bets Excel for brute strength. It is a fantastic tool. However, for creating good looking basic spreadsheets, Numbers does a fair job. In this case, they are simply not aimed at the same market. But, that certainly doesn't mean that I wouldn't much rather see some of the vast array of shortcomings that are in Number get whittled down a bit...
My big complaint, frankly, is that if you can argue that the iPad is roughly as powerful as an eight to ten year old Mac, then why isn't Pages for iOS as powerful as the earlier versions of Pages that would run on those old Macs? Simply put, I understand that Pages can't be as powerful as the current desktop version, but it doesn't make sense to me that it is as crippled as it currently is...
What's shocking is that it takes Microsoft sooo long to release that Office for iPad.
Hopefully they won't screw it up by attempting to include all the Microsoft-typical bloat.
Hopefully they won't screw it up by attempting to include all the Microsoft-typical bloat.
you know what they say:
if it walks like a truck, talks like a truck... ;- )
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Or, they could see office as a killer app in competition with the iPad - in which case they would be fools releasing it, regardless of apples share of the market. So no, this doesn't have to be true.
What is certain however is that 2012 will see at least one version of Office for ARM.
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2004 and 2011 aren't that bad. 2008 was neutered though. especially excel. Or... perhaps I'm just doing different things now than i were back then. Either way, 2011 is way better than 2008.
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Finally? Isn't that exactly what Gates said when he bailed Jobs and Apple out last century?
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psst... microsoft doesn't produce tablets and phones.
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Kinect.
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2008 was written for both intel and ppc. blame Apple for that, not Microsoft.
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Basically its about getting Lion functionality into Office. Versioning, full screen mode etc. So yeah, not a major release. Not much of a release at all for non-Lion users, in fact.
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In messing up everything with ribbon for 1% of computer users, they fixed it for 99%. Thats what people (like us, the 1%) tend to ignore.
Well, since you don't have direct access to the iPad's file system (thanks to Apple's artificial restrictions), you will be able to enjoy the awesome, magical, beautiful, revolutionary new feature that will allow you to send your Excel files via eMail to yourself from within Excel. Isn't that a mind blowing, awesome solution to a problem that you only have because you are using a crippled platform? And won't that be worth, let's say, 500 bucks for the business edition of Office? I'm sure that all "executives" and other suits will buy this thing like crazy, because it'll make them look so important and trendy in boring corporate meetings -- another expensive, useless status symbol that their company can buy for them.
There was a time when the industry was still trying to come up with products that actually were useful, innovative and changed the way we did things for the better. This whole tablet mania, except for eBook reading, is beyond me.
I'm going to print this - wirelessly, from my iPad - and hand it out to my fellow "suits" at our staff meeting this morning.
In between puffs on our Montecristo cigars and evil-scheming to profit from our double-reverse index swaps on 60-day Eurodollar futures, we'll all enjoy a hearty chuckle.
It sure is nice not to have our computers ruled by smelly fat guys with Cheetos stuck in their sweatpants. The day we shut down the IT department and had the security goons escort those losers off the premises was the day we started getting things done around here.
Thanks for everything Steve!
Maybe you should just use TeX then. You know, the right tool for the right job...
Word processors are grossly inefficient for what you seem to want to do.
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You guys are probably too young to remember, but there was a time Microsoft actually did sell the applications unbundled :
Pages and Numbers suffers the same issue.
LTD - laugh all you want. You're either too young or never used tablets that were around in the early 90s.
As someone who did - as their sole computing device - the Compaq I used with Pen Computing on 3.1 was amazing. As I was traveling nearly every day (home only 2-3 days a month) - having a tablet made life a lot easier.
It's not tablets in quotes. It's tablets. I know it's really uncomfortable to think of another company (or companies) having useful products - even if at the time it was extremely niche - other than Apple. But no matter how much you try and spin it or put words in quotes - that doesn't change the fact.
You often have good/interesting insights. But when you make remarks like the above it makes it extremely hard to take you seriously at all.
So yes. Speaking from experience - and not out of my hindquarters - and also for a few of my co-workers back then - the tablets we used were awesome and ran a full version of office which didn't sacrifice anything.
Keynote is better than PowerPoint, yes. But as you said, if you have to share the file with other people to wrk on it, Keynote is out of the picture.
At work they also compliment my presentations done in Keynote. And when I'm not gong to share the presentation I might do it in Keynote. But for anything else, they've asked me to use PowerPoint.
Same with word. Use something little more advanced, and things start getting complicated when sharing.
And Numbers, I think this is what kills iWork in business. Most businesses use Excel a lot, it's a very useful application, and when you use it well, it can easily replace other more expensive programs. It's a shame people don't get to learn Excel to it's full potential. It's not that they don't need it, it's that they don't know how to use it and so they think they don't need it.
Get Outlook 2011 fixed first
I am not going to fill pages and bore folks with the faults on Outlook 2011 but they are many and serious. Outlook is a pretty essential business tool for Macs and its implementation is still not as good as the previous Entourage. I would much rather MS focused on sorting its existing programs rather than going off at a tangent.
I find the iPad whilst a great viewing and information provision tool, is unsuited as a working, typing or data entry tool and therefore have no interest in Word or Excel on it. I have Pages on my iPad and I think have used it twice. The iPad app could be useful to others as a run time tool for a PowerPoint presentation but I would not care to write a detailed presentation on it.
I am not going to fill pages and bore folks with the faults on Outlook 2011 but they are many and serious. Outlook is a pretty essential business tool for Macs and its implementation is still not as good as the previous Entourage. I would much rather MS focused on sorting its existing programs rather than going off at a tangent.
I find the iPad whilst a great viewing and information provision tool, is unsuited as a working, typing or data entry tool and therefore have no interest in Word or Excel on it. I have Pages on my iPad and I think have used it twice. The iPad app could be useful to others as a run time tool for a PowerPoint presentation but I would not care to write a detailed presentation on it.
So true. I use Keynote, Mail, and NeoOffice (for word processing and spreadsheets). MS has and always will be too unreliable for me.
Hahaha, that's funny stuff.
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Keynote is terrific from the little I've used it, but I did get to see some files get munged between platforms just a couple of weeks ago. I guess once in Keynote, stay in Keynote ... if there was a simple runtime wrapper for distribution for Windows[?]
Pages didn't really stand up to my testing for writing technical documents, briefs, etc., don't think it had a footnote feature, missing some other, I suppose you call them "professional" features.
I guess if I were to rate iWorks in a consumer (personal/home) and pro usage, on a 1-10 scale (of effectiveness in that market):
Pages, Consumer 9/10, Pro 5/10
Numbers, Consumer 8/10, Pro 3/10
Keynote, Consumer (kind of n/a), but 10/10, Pro 9/10 (a point dinged due to portability)
Anyway, excited about this product if it does get made. MS should develop a Sharepoint gateway to work with iOS Office. You gen up a document, and it's sync'ed across to a central document repository, with checkout, collaborative markup, etc. You don't need access to the filesystem, just access to the files.
If Microsoft brings MSOffice to the iPad, you can take that as a backhanded acknowledgement from Microsoft that Windows Tablet (or whatever they are calling it this week) is dead, even if Microsoft continues to sell it and champion it for a while -- right up to the moment they officially pull the plug. For those of you old enough to remember, think back to how Microsoft did exactly the same thing to OS/2.