Bonnie Cha takes the new Office suite for a spin.
Office for iPad is free to download, and gives you the ability to read Word documents, work with Excel data and present PowerPoint presentations at no extra cost. But, like Office Mobile, to really unlock the full potential of the suite (editing and creating documents), you need an Office 365 subscription, which starts at $99.99 per year for the Home Premium edition (students get a bit of a break with an $80 Office 365 University edition; the $70 Office 365 Personal edition will also be supported when it launches later this spring). This gets you five downloads of the full Office suite for Macs or PCs and five tablets.
For Office 365 subscribers, it’s a no-brainer. Office for iPad is a great addition, and you should definitely download it. It’s certainly the best iPad office suite I’ve tested to date. For everyone else, it may come down to how much you use the Microsoft Office suite in your professional or personal life, and how much you plan on working on your iPad. If your answer is “not much,” or it’s simply too expensive, there are capable and cheaper alternatives like those from Apple, QuickOffice and Documents to Go.
Gave all three apps a quick test with selected Office docs iWork could not display correctly, and especially one pretty complex Excel sheet from our accounting trolls… In all fairness: the apps are great. Responsive, completely correct rendition, Excel renders all interactive items and even inline graphs properly, all review features are there, there is offline storage, One Drive and Sharepoint support. Even things like freezing panes in Excel and moving objects between apps are there. Quite impressive.
Now, if MS would at some point jump over their shadow and add iCloud and Dropbox support, at least for importing documents without duplicating them among different apps, it would be even better.
Not for me..
Interesting how that review just blew past a very interesting point: you can’t print from Office?