First look: Office for iPad is a mixed bag, but a good first step

[UPDATED 4/29/14] Microsoft’s release of Office for the iPad is both a shock to the system and a long time coming. It’s a shock because the company has been steadfastly crippling its software on other platforms in hopes of forcing people to stick with Windows. But with yesterday’s announcement, new CEO Satya Nadella broke from that past, and it’s a major, necessary mental shift for the company. It’s a long time coming because Apple has had the desktop-class iWork office suite — Pages, Numbers, and Keynote — since 2010, and there are several credible third-party office apps as well. Microsoft is very late to the game.

Office for iPad is Microsoft’s best touch-oriented software ever. It’s much better than the barely functional Office for Windows Phone, Android, and iPhone, and much easier to use than the special Office edition for Microsoft’s Surface tablets. It’s also a step up from the Web version of Office on the iPad. Had Microsoft released this Office for its Surface tablets, people might actually have adopted Surface tablets in decent numbers. Oddly, there’s still no usable Office for Surface nor an Office for Android tablets, so Microsoft’s office-everywhere ambitions are clearly not fully realized.

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Before you rejoice over Office finally coming to the iPad, I have to caution you: Office for iPad has weaknesses that will likely keep most iPad users sticking to Apple’s software, which can read and write the Microsoft Office formats with ease. Compared to its previous versions, Office for iPad is a major improvement. But compared to iWork, it’s inferior.

Office for iPad is a moderately useful product and one that doesn’t yet deliver on Nadella’s grand rhetoric about Microoft being mobile- and cloud-first. Office is still most definitely a desktop-first product, and Office for iPad doesn’t move the needle far enough from that state. I suspect Nadella inherited this product from predecessor Steve Ballmer, so maybe next year we’ll get the real mobile-first Office for iPad.

The Office user interface is clean and straightforward, a must for iPad users, but it keeps the Metro identity Microsoft debuted in Windows Phone and Windows 8. That’s an admirable feat. But I do wish that Microsoft had used larger, bolder type than it did in the Office UI — Office for iPad is easier to use with reading glasses on than without them.

Because Google crippled Quickoffice to promote its awful Google Drive editing tools and because Citrix bought the very capable Office2HD and made it available only to Citrix ShareFile users, the reality is that there are only two real competitors for office productivity on the iPad now: Office and iWork. If they still existed in their pre-acquisition forms, Office for iPad would rank after them but ahead of marginal products like Polaris Office and DocsToGo. In other words, it’s second best by default and not yet fully by merit.

Office for iPad doesn’t play nicely with others or with files One flaw is that Office is slow in storing files to and reading files from its OneDrive cloud service. It loads the entire file each time and eats up your data plan much quicker than with iWork for iPad, which sends only the changes between your iPad and Apple’s iCloud service. Like iWork, Office does save a working copy of your OneDrive files to your iPad, so if you lose your Internet connection you still have that local version to work with. But it doesn’t sync versions across all your devices in the background as iWork does. (That’s a bit odd, as Microsoft sells Office 365 through the Apple App Store, which should make it eligible to use iCloud, an Apple service that is available to App Store developers only.)

There are also no controls for file renaming and folder organization in Office for iPad as there are in iWork. But you can duplicate files within the Office apps and save them to your iPad’s local storage rather than to OneDrive or SharePoint. And there’s no export capability to other formats, as in iWork. Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage app doesn’t help much — its file-renaming process is unintuitive and excessively complicated. It can’t create folders either, although it lets you move files into existing folders.

Also, OneDrive is not smart enough to open your Office documents in Office on your iPad. Seriously — you get a read-only preview.

Microsoft has also overly limited Office’s ability to work with other apps and cloud storage services. It doesn’t use the iOS Open In facility to send files to other compatible apps, as iWork does. That means you can’t send an Office file to iWork, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Quickoffice, or any other compatible app. You can only use OneDrive or SharePoint — if you have a corporate Office 365 account with SharePoint included, that is.

OneDrive won’t let you share files with other iPad apps, either. You can email yourself the file and open it in a desired app from Mail, but what a waste of bandwidth and time!

Also, forget about exporting to file formats like PDF, CSV, and ePub. Office doesn’t do any of these. But, thanks to an update issued on April 29, it now can print to AirPrint printers.

This is the old Microsoft getting in the way of the new Microsoft that Nadella promised — and getting in the way of users. Isn’t it ironic that Apple is more open in iWork than Microsoft is in Office?

Word is a good editor When people think of Office productivity apps, Microsoft Word is usually the first thing that comes to mind. Fortunately, Word for iPad is a pretty good word processor. It has most of the features you’d expect: revisions tracking, the ability to apply style sheets, search and replace, the ability to apply a variety of text formats from boldface to bullets, a spelling checker and word counter, graphics and text boxes insertion, and footnotes — just like Pages. And as with Pages, you can’t create styles in Word, just use the ones in your document or template. Unlike Pages, Word lets you insert hyperlinks and choose which language to use for spell checking.

Pages has a few capabilities that Word doesn’t, such as the ability to insert comments (Word can only display those added in the desktop version), provide snap-to guides for layouts, password-protect files, and of course, print and export documents. Pages’s layout capabilities are more sophisticated, as are its table formatting options. Still, the differences won’t cause anyone to eschew Word.

Excel is comfortingly familiar Until Google ruined it, I strongly preferred Quickoffice for spreadsheet work because it was so much like Excel. Apple’s Numbers is quite capable, but it works very differently from Excel and is a difficult adjustment for most people. Although I like Numbers’s use of contextual keyboards based on the kind of data you’re working on, I know many people find them confusing.

But now we have Excel itself on the iPad, and Microsoft has done a good job of bringing the familiar Excel experience to the tablet. It has the neat option of letting you switch between the standard alphabetic keyboard and a numeric one. It accomplishes the same goal as Numbers’s contextual keyboards, but with just two options you intentionally select from, it’s a less jarring experience for Excel jockeys.

Excel for iPad is chock-full of formulas in lots of categories — an Excel jockey’s dream come true. It also has strong chart-creation capabilities, though no better than what Numbers offers. Excel offers a few capabilities Numbers doesn’t, such as sorting and the ability to freeze panes. It does lack the password protection and CSV and PDF export capabilities that Numbers provides.

PowerPoint is the weakest link PowerPoint for iPad is a weak version of PowerPoint, and it is far less capable than Apple’s Keynote for iPad. Keynote is an amazing app, better than PowerPoint for Windows and OS X, perhaps because it was designed for the exacting Steve Jobs. Putting aside that high standard, PowerPoint for iPad doesn’t compare well to Microsoft’s computer versions, as it should.

You can’t search and replace, password-protect files, apply hyperlinks or in-presentation links, or control presentations on another device — all things Keynote can do. You can’t apply transition and build effects to individual items as Keynote can — just to entire slides — though any such item transitions are at least retained when opened in PowerPoint for iPad. You can see comments made on the desktop version of PowerPoint, but not add your own.

The notes view obscures your slide view (a flaw shared by Keynote). I often couldn’t type notes in existing presentations — the onscreen keyboard would not display — nor could I paste text into the notes in those cases. PowerPoint also crashed several times when saving new documents.

PowerPoint for iPad is more than a viewer but less than a creator. It’s fine for basic editing and simple presentations. But road warriors can do so much more in Keynote.

Office for iPad is free, but at a cost Office for iPad is free but allows editing only if you pay for an Office 365 subscription ($10 per month for a family, and $12 per user per month for a business subscription that covers just the Office software, not Exchange and related communications services). Otherwise, you can only preview files, which is useless because iOS can do that already without any extra software. iWork is free on new iPads, and costs $10 per app for iPads purchased before October 2013.

In other words, Office for iPad requires you to pay for Office 365 every year, not just once. Adobe’s done the same to its Creative Suite, and I suspect it’s a change the cloud will allow software vendors to apply widely. Software will be like cable TV in that you’ll never stop paying for it, and the price is likely to rise every year once you’re hooked.

Even though Office for iPad is free in that context, it’s not as compelling an app as it should be. Microsoft has been in the Office game for more than 20 years, nearly 30 if you count the DOS versions, and its mobile Office should be better than Apple’s much more recent entry. It’s not.

The good news is that Word and Excel are quite competent. The bad news is that PowerPoint is overly limited, and Microsoft’s insular approach to file management and lack of features like local sharing against using it as your default iPad office editor.

Is the glass half full or half empty? That’s a hard question to answer from this first version, but at least there’s now water in the glass.

This article, “First look: Office for iPad is a mixed bag, but a good first step,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.