iPad face-off: Microsoft Office vs. Apple iWork vs. Google Apps

The other shoe has dropped: Apple recently revised its iWork productivity suite (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) to take advantage of the split-screen multitasking introduced in iOS 9 for select iPad models. Microsoft had done the same several weeks earlier in its Office 365 productivity suite (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint).

But both Office and iWork are about much more than split-screen multitasking. Apple also revised iWork for OS X and for iCloud (its Web version), deepening the suite across all three platforms. Microsoft likewise recently released Office 2016 for Windows and now has its Office suite available across Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android, as well as on the Web (via Office Online), all sharing the same large core set of capabilities. Microsoft has had a series of updates to Office for iPad over the last several months that have beefed up its capabilities.

Both companies treat their mobile apps as siblings to their desktop apps, and it shows. As a result, InfoWorld is applying the same evaluative criteria to the mobile versions of office productivity tools as it does to the desktop versions. They’re now all simply office apps. The scorecards here reflect that change.

What about Google Apps? Google pioneered the collaborative platform, using Web apps to break down the computer-based silos in productivity suites. For several years Google has offered mobile apps to extend those capabilities beyond the desktop browser. But Google has done very little with its Google Apps suite (Docs, Sheets, and Slides) for some time.

So far, Google has not added support for the new split-screen multitasking in iOS 9. Now that iWork and Office are at rough parity across their respective set of supported platforms, Google Apps’ stagnancy is much more apparent. It supports many fewer capabilities than either iWork or Office and is frankly not a great choice for business use.

The core capabilities compared

Apple, Microsoft, and Google all consider their productivity suites to be more than a collection of apps. Instead, the three companies see them as services that work across computers, mobile devices, and the Web, so users can use whichever client is at hand to access their centrally stored documents, as well as share those documents with other people for collaboration.

Office for iPad is included with an Office 365 subscription, though the apps tend to go overboard in asking you to sign in — it’s much too often. Nonsubscribers can use a subset of Office’s editing capabilities for free. iWork for iPad is free for iPad owners. Google Apps is free if you have a Google account, though there is a paid version for enterprise and government use that adds Exchange-like administration capabilities.

File handling. Naturally, Office for iPad natively supports the Office file formats, and it does an excellent job of maintaining file compatibility as documents are moved among its desktop and mobile apps.

iWork has its own file formats, but it does a very good job of importing and exporting the standard Office formats as well. The October 2015 update to iWork reinstates read/write support for older iWork file formats, whose exclusion in both iOS and OS X a year ago deservedly caused an uproar among users.

In both Office and iWork, font differences are the biggest culprits in unwanted reflow and problematic display as documents move from one platform to another.

Google Apps also uses its own file formats, but it can import and export native Office files. Google Apps can work directly on native Office documents, but doing so dramatically reduces the editing and formatting capabilities for these documents, so you need to convert your documents first to Google’s formats, then export them when done for non-Google users. Google’s conversion between its formats and Office’s formats is less faithful than iWork’s conversion, especially around layout, but it’s adequate for basic documents. Advantage: Office and iWork (tie).

Office, iWork, and Apps can export files to PDFs, but only iWork can export text documents to the ePub format and spreadsheets to CSV. The internal code in Apple’s ePub export, however, is very messy and littered with local overrides that inhibit further editing or proper TOC generation; it’s not up to snuff for publishing documents for use in iBooks or other e-bookstores, but it’s fine for distributing documents for co-workers to read in iBooks or similar e-readers. Advantage: iWork.

Both Office and iWork can print to AirPrint-compatible printers, though the control for doing so in Office is not in iOS’s standard Share menu (which Office doesn’t use) but in the File menu. Google Apps supports both AirPrint and Google’s own Cloud Print protocol, but printing is not intuitive: You have to preview a document (using the More menu) to get the Print option.

Office does not support iOS’s Open In facility, so you can’t directly send a document from Word, Excel, or PowerPoint into a compatible app on your iPad, as you can with iWork and Apps. If you want to open a document in another app, you have to store the files in a location that the other app can access, then directly open the documents from that other app. Apps uses the same circuitous path to send a document to another app as it does for printing: doing a print preview first, which is completely unintuitive. Advantage: iWork.

Office and Apps let you make a copy of your document while it is open (use the File menu in Office, the More menu’s Share & Export option in Apps), similar to the Save As option computers have had since practically Day 1. iWork does not; you must duplicate the file in the document viewer before you open it if you want to save your changes as a copy. Advantage: Office and Apps.

All three suites autosave their documents while you work on them, though Office lets you turn off autosave when working in a document if you desire.

iWork lets you apply a password to individual files, which neither Apps nor Office do. Advantage: iWork.

But Office lets you revert a document to the last version (meaning its state when you last opened it), which neither iWork nor Apps does. Advantage: Office.

Cloud capabilities. The three office suites assume the use of cloud storage, particularly Apple’s iCloud Drive for iWork, Microsoft’s OneDrive for Office, and Google Drive for Apps. All three suites present documents stored on their respective services in their default document views, with the ability to create folders and move documents among them.

Both Office and iWork support iOS’s cloud plug-in architecture, in which you can open and save files to other cloud services, in what Apple calls Locations. This OS-level feature is a bit clumsy to open (you click More to access it in Office, and — not so intuitively — tap + in iWork) and navigate. Box, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, and OneDrive all support Locations, but Dropbox supports it only for saving files, not opening them. That makes using Dropbox with iWork difficult.

By contrast, Office directly supports Dropbox, so you can easily open and save files without going through the Locations feature. Office also directly supports corporate SharePoint repositories via Office 365. By contrast, Google Apps supports only local files and Google Drive. Advantage: Office.

iCloud Drive is a sync-and-store service, so it keeps a local copy on each device after iCloud syncs, so you can access at least recent documents even without an Internet connection. Both OneDrive and Google Drive are traditional sync-as-needed services, so you need a live Internet connection to open any document that you did not explicitly store on your iPad. That makes the iWork suite more usable while traveling on airplanes and other typically disconnected (or expensively connected) environments. Advantage: iWork.

Document sharing. All three suites support document sharing: You create a hyperlink to the document for viewing or for editing (your choice). In all three cases, editing requires that the recipient have the appropriate account (iCloud for iWork, Office 365 for Office, or Google Drive for Apps). In the case of Office, editing links are permitted only if enabled by your Office 365 administrator, but you can also share documents directly with other corporate users from the Office apps.

iWork uses the standard iOS sharing tool, whereas Office and Apps employ their own tools. After you create a link, Office closes the sharing tool, which makes you think it canceled out. What actually happened? Office copied the link to the Clipboard and closed the tool, but it doesn’t let you know that. iWork and Apps simply present the link for you to copy yourself.

iWork also helpfully adds an icon to the top of the screen for a shared document, as well as in the document viewer, reminding you it is currently shared; Office and Apps do not give you any such easy reminder. Advantage: iWork.

iWork lets you assign a password to a file shared for editing, and you can unshare the link from within iWork. When working with personal files (not stored on your corporate OneDrive for Business or SharePoint repository), Office doesn’t let you assign a password to a shared file for editing, and it doesn’t let you disable that sharing, either in the Office apps or in the OneDrive app. However, you can manage individuals’ access to corporate documents shared directly with other corporate users from within the Office apps.

iWork doesn’t have this concept of personal versus corporate use. Apps does not support passwords for shared editing links, but like Office it offers a direct-sharing capability to individual users. In an enterprise version of Google Apps, sharing would work the same way as direct sharing does in a corporate Office 365 environment. Advantage: Office and Apps (tie).

iWork has added sharing support for Android users, but they can only view shared documents. Shared iWork documents can be edited only in a Windows PC or Mac browser, or in iOS or OS X via an iWork app. Shared Office documents can be edited in Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android via the native Office apps on those platforms or via a desktop browser on a PC or Mac. Shared Apps documents can be edited in iOS and Android via the native mobile apps and in Windows, OS X, and Chrome OS via a browser. Advantage: Office and Apps (tie).

Only iWork supports iOS’s Handoff capability, which lets you transfer a document from one device to another while in progress without an Internet connection (it uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct). This feature is quite handy if you, for example, start a quick edit in Pages on your iPad and realize you have more involved work to do than expected. When you get to your Mac, the Dock shows the Pages icon if the Pages app is running, and you click it to transfer that document to Pages on your Mac. You can transfer a document from your Mac to the iPad the same way. However, Handoff works only on Macs and iOS devices, so it’s not useful in a multiplatform environment. Advantage: iWork.

Common user interface: The ribbon interface in Word — indeed, in all Office apps — is surprisingly easy to use, speaking as someone who can’t stand it in Windows or on the Mac. iWork’s user interface is more compact and requires more switching within tabbed panes, but it is also clearer about the results you’ll get. Apps uses a similar interface approach as iWork, but its interface confusingly changes based on whether you are editing a native Google document or a native Office doc. Advantage: Office.

All three apps use a document viewer to show you your available documents and to create new ones, as well as rename, duplicate, import, and share files. They look quite different from one another, but the differences are more cosmetic than functional.

Word processing compared

All three suites do the basics: enter, edit, and format text; format paragraphs and lists; search and replace text (with whole-word and capitalization options); insert and edit tables; insert and wrap around images; and spell-check text, track revisions, and add comments. However, Google Apps can check spelling and track revisions only in files saved in the Office formats, and it can work only with tables and images saved in its native format.

Google Docs cannot create hyperlinks in text, though Microsoft Word and iWork Pages can. And Word and Pages offer much more formatting capabilities, such as text backgrounds, text boxes, footers and headers, shapes, footnotes, page margins, page orientation, breaks, and columns. Both have ruler views.

Neither Word, Pages, nor Docs support paragraph and character style creation and editing in their iPad incarnations. All three preserve styles applied to imported documents, and both Word and Pages let you apply those imported paragraph styles to text on the iPad (though not character styles). But you can’t create your own styles on the iPad, which makes it hard to do stable document formatting.

Word and Pages are nearly equal in their capabilities, with only a few differences around the edges. For example, Word lets you lock specific authors from making revisions in a shared file, whereas Pages does not. Pages offers a much richer set of preformatted tables and charts than Word does. Advantage: Pages and Word (tie).

Spreadsheets compared

It’s a similar story for spreadsheet editing: Google Sheets has only basic capabilities: cell and text formatting; row, column, and cell insertion and deletion; a strong selection of formulas; and a rich set of data formats. If you work on native Excel files, the number of formulas and formats declines significantly, and you lose some formatting options such as strikethrough and decimal place settings.

Both Excel and iWork Numbers are rich with functionality, and they do nearly everything the desktop versions do. However, you don’t get the more complex features like pivot tables, linked spreadsheets, and macros that the Mac and Windows versions offer.

Numbers offers richer formatting options for tables, charts, and images than Excel does. And it supports several number formats — pop-up menus, star ratings, check boxes, sliders, and steppers — that a traditional Excel user would shake his or her head at, but they work well for nontraditional but common spreadsheet uses as a list manager and interactive dashboard or calculator.

Furthermore, Numbers’ adaptive onscreen keyboard makes numeric and formula entry easier than Excel’s more standard onscreen keyboard.

But Excel provides the ability to sort contents within selected cells, columns, and rows, which Numbers does not — and that’s a commonly used spreadsheet capability whose omission in Numbers would frustrate those who normally use Excel. Advantage: Excel and Numbers.

Presentations compared

Google Slides is a relatively more capable app than its word processor and spreadsheet analogs. Slides lets you create and edit slides, along with their content, and even add speaker notes. If you use the native Slides file format, you can include tables in your slides, as well as apply borders to text boxes and adjust line spacing.

Nonetheless, PowerPoint and iWork Keynote are leagues more sophisticated. Both support dozens of build effects and slide transitions, and you get the same sophisticated charting, table, and shapes tools here as you do in the rest of the Office and iWork suites. Plus, you can insert videos from your iPad’s Photos app. Both PowerPoint and Keynote also let you set up presentations to autoplay; Keynote even lets you associate a music playlist from the Music app to a slideshow.

PowerPoint and Keynote also let you annotate your slides as you go through them, with a simulated laser pointer and the ability to draw on your slides, such as to post to an item or underline text as you speak. PowerPoint’s presenter view shows the upcoming slides (which you can jump among) and your presenter notes.

Keynote assumes you’re remotely controlling your presentation from Keynote on your Mac, iPhone, or iPod Touch via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi Direct, so it puts the speakers notes and upcoming slides on that device. Keynote’s remote-control capability is very handy, especially if you (like me) tend to walk the stage while presenting.

PowerPoint can’t do that, but it lets you control your presentation from your Apple Watch — if you run that presentation from your iPhone. (So does Keynote.) Advantage: Keynote and PowerPoint.

Making a choice

It should be clear that the choice is between iWork and Office. Of course, that needn’t be a choice, since iWork comes with your iPad, and it’s a rare business that won’t provide Office to its employees. (That is why Microsoft has tied the iOS and Android versions of Office to having an Office 365 subscription, to force the issue for companies with mobile workers.)

Because both suites are nearly equivalent in their productivity capabilities, your decision will be driven largely by two other factors:

• Office dominance. Because Office for iPad looks and works very much like Office for Android, Office 2016 for Mac, and Office 2016 for Windows, it makes a lot of sense for a “Microsoft shop” to have everyone use Office everywhere. That reduces training and makes document flow a little easier. In more heterogeneous environments, iWork’s strong file compatibility with Office means you can have your iWork and Office too.
• Collaboration and cloud differences. All three suites differ most in how they handle files in the cloud and how they support collaboration. Even when their functionality is the same, how they deliver that functionality can differ significantly. Your cloud foundation and sharing approaches might tilt you to Office or iWork.

The good news is you really can’t go wrong either way — or both ways.