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Microsoft Launches Office For iPad: Includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
An anonymous reader writes "At an event in San Francisco today, Microsoft Office General Manager Julia White unveiled Office for iPad, featuring Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The new suite, which supports viewing but not editing for free, will go live in Apple's App Store at 11:00AM PDT (2:00PM EST). Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for iPad feature a ribbon interface just like the one featured in Office for Windows and OS X. The trio of apps are much more powerful on the tablet than the smartphone, but naturally aren't comparable to the desktop versions."
The absolute best use of a phone in the office IMO is to connect the meeting-room projector/screen to the phone HDMI out and project without needing a laptop. When I worked at VMware we'd do this with a remote desktop app back to a Windows desktop, but just running PPT/Word native is even easier. Plus the opportunities for embarrassing chats popping up are that much better!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's because Steve Ballmer refused to acknowledge iOS's existence. Now that a new guy is in charge, things are happening again.
Doesn't seem that way:
Make no mistake about it: These three apps are feature-rich, powerful tools for creating and editing Office documents. They look and act like their Office 2013 counterparts on Windows. And although these iPad apps obviously can't replicate every feature of the full desktop programs, they deliver an impressive subset of those features. Anyone who was expecting Office Lite or a rehash of the underwhelming Office for iPhone will be pleasantly surprised.
(Thanks to DaringFireball for the link and summary).
I will download them for sure, but it really puts me off having to use a subscription to use them for editing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Free, unless you want to edit something, and then it's a subscription? Fuck that. I'd rather pay $15 for the whole mess and be able to edit right away. Microsoft: always finding ways to fuck up a good idea.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
This isn't so much about a paid subscription as it is not having to pay Apple for each copy of Office sold. This is their way of getting around that. Wonder how long it'll take Apple to close this loophole in the future...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
how exactly is this better, in any way, than Docs to Go which is only 10-15 bucks one time, or free if you are cool with having ads, or free if you are on Blackberry 10.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Still waiting for Libreoffice for Android (which would be of use to me) and Ipad (which I guess other people would use).
The best Android app I've found for "office" stuff is Kingsoft Office but it can't work with Open Document files, just Microsoft formatted stuff. I wish I had one that would work with Open Document; it would be a lot more useful.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
I wonder how porty the ports are.
Will I go to shut down my phone and be greeted with a popup that "Cannot quit Excel now"?
Will I thumb-whip an Excel spreadsheet to scroll down, and be greeted with a popup saying, "Insufficient resources to display", accompanied by a screen that no longer redraws?
These are both still features of 2010.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
While the initial presence of them took many off guard... it's been with us so long I'd wager most (who have been using them for that time) are more or less used to them and see the benefit.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
What are you talking about?
I wonder if they wrote it more or less from scratch, or if they managed to reuse a lot of code from some other platform (e.g. Office for Mac OS X)?
I am not really here right now.
Because one huge tech company is finally acknowledging the existence of another huge tech company's mobile operating system, something long overdue (according to some). Perhaps boring -- especially if you use neither Office nor iOS -- but certainly tech news.
i have the original ipad. it wont upgrade to the newer ios. microsoft word and excel wont install. there are many other apps that wont install.
Well, .... sorry, what exactly is the benefit you mention?
i have a Mac.
Workimg at client side with ribbons is so awfull
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I can get some fricking work done.
Microsoft gets interesting once you scratch the Surface.
I find it better than the mess of menus and toolbars where some functions are in one, some functions are in the other and some functions are in both. Even on the Mac version of office the ribbons work really well. Toolbars are horrible things, just a non-contextual mess of little icons.
...in it's absence. Honestly, is it really that hard to develop an Outlook client? I mean, I understand that Microsoft is only one of the biggest companies in the world, but, still....
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Meh, I'll just use Google Docs. When that isn't enough I'll open Libre/Open Office.
While I prefer Excel, those other options do just fine for anything I'll be doing outside of work. Plus you can get Apple's suite of office apps for free as well. MS screwed themselves by making it a pay to edit setup.
The problem with the ribbon is that when people complain about it, they seem to forget that the alternative isn't much better from a UX standpoint and that it launched on an application that the ribbon wasn't going to fix.
Office style apps, particularly word processing is just a messy UI. Unless you want less features. Period.
When dealing with new applications, the Ribbon concept is actually quite nice addition to a UI designer's tool kit. Probably one that should be doing what traditional tool bars have been doing for years. It's cleaner. I'd rather lose some UI space in exchange for some clarity of purpose for UI elements.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Bing and Outlook also harvest data from their users....of what little they have.
Sorry guys, but you're way too late to the party, everyone has already been and gone and eaten your lunch a long time ago. They didn't think you'd ever show up. Your cola is still here if you want it, but it's warm and flat.
$80 for a 365 subscription? pffffft, please.
-- Fuck Beta
I have had enough of this touch stuff on my ipad. I need to install DOS and get some real work done.
I'm not surprise at all. It was launch months ago when the new Microsoft CEO take over. On the other hand, only MS Office subscriber can edit word, excel and powerpoint in ipad.
For me the ribbon just looks like multitude of toolbars, takes me always ages to find functionality that I need, as the icons tell me nothing and I have to hover over everyone to see what it does.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Interesting, so Apple got a free look into the source code of (iOS) MS Office before approving it for the App store?
People don't need paper, so programs designed to format stuff for A4 or Letter are disappearing.
People need collaboration and sharing, so online tools are greatly helpful, and generally don't require the recipient to have $300 worth of software, and non guarantee that it will render correctly.
The office suite is changing. MS Office has some improvements in electronic documents through OneNote, and Outlook/Exchange are doing some good jobs in Mobile Device Management. Sharepoint is improving collaboration. But these combinations of corporate infrastructure and office suites are very business-oriented, and mostly helpful for data self-determination, not for the general public.
LibreOffice seems to be doing none of this, and Thunderbird seems to be in maintainence mode, as though local email and calendaring has been solved and won't be addressed anymore. That said, I appreciate that the LibreOffice is continually improving in its specific areas, and Thunderbird is mostly feature-complete.
Not that I'd use a tablet for serious work.
The thing is, people used to buy Office for use at home, because that's what they used at work, and they needed it to work from home. So they bought a copy for their home PC - or pirated a copy from work. Or, just followed the path of least resistance and paid for a copy along with their PC, which has on and off been hard not to do.
But these days, most occasional work from home is best handled by RDP'ing into your home system (or possibly taking home your company-issued laptop). In other words, if your work uses Office, you can use your work copy of the code. So, sure Office - as a de-facto standard - isn't going away. But most casual home users don't really need it. Some users might derive enough benefit to bother springing for a home copy - and the iPad version might actually be a nice option for business travelers that don't want to lug a laptop around. But, unless you are a heavy user, or computer-phobic enough to think you can't learn to use a different app, LibreOffice will serve your purposes fine - even if those purposes have to do with docs created in MSOffice.
But getting back to why iPad, why now. That bit about casual home users is key. They haven't had Office, and they haven't missed it enough to switch to Surfaces. For a while Microsoft was hoping that would be the case, but apparently they were smart enough to hedge their bets and develop an iPad version anyway. Because they must've sensed an inflection point where a sizable portion of their user base was finally realizing they were less locked in than they thought they were. Even the arguments on here about "you just don't understand how invaluable MSO is in the real world" are arguments for accepting lock-in as inevitable. So you folks making that argument might consider that Microsoft seems to understand where the industry is going better than you do.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
A production tool on a consumption device? Intresting. Why not just get a Surface?
Office style apps, particularly word processing is just a messy UI. Unless you want less features. Period.
What on earth gives you the idea that a messy UI is intrinsic to the problem of word processing?
Word and the other MS Office apps have messy UIs because they have 25 years of legacy to cope with. Various competitors, such as LibreOffice also have legacy, plus the additional burden that they started by copying MS Office.
But this will be useful for those people who bring their iPads (and the keyboard cases) to every meeting that they go to. These people will love it in that they will be able to work with those documents in those meetings instead of having to wait until they get back to their desks.
Right - I'm not denying the benefit for those who use MSO and pay up. Just saying that Microsoft was waiting out the clock hoping for an MSO-fueled success of its tablets. But they must see the free competition as too compelling to wait it out - even if their fans don't. If LibreOffice had hit the iPad before MSO, it could've provided considerable incentive for users to switch to that pretty damn capable free alternative that, oh yeah, happens to 'work on all my devices'.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
The thing I like is that the ribbons are categorized and then the buttons in the ribbons are grouped (and the group is labelled), I find that makes it a LOT more useful than toolbars.
Ribbons are better than toolbars but worth than menus, imho.
I basically never use toolbars, hence I dislike ribbons, it takes to long to find what I need.
On a menu bar I click on any menu, then keep the mouse pressed and swipe over it to find what I need, and I see the shortcuts immediately. Also on windows once you could use alt-F plus alt-S to activate File/Save etc.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.