Office on the iPad is better but still not good enough

The blogosphere has been abuzz for months about rumors that Microsoft would release Office for iPad this month. But last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told Bloomberg News that it was “unnecessary” to provide an iOS version of the world’s most-used office productivity suite. After all, he said, users can run Office Web Apps, which was released in the fall, in the iPad’s Safari browser instead to get the editing capabilities they need.

Using the 2011 version of Office Web Apps on the iPad — indeed, on anything but a Windows PC — was extremely painful and ultimately fruitless, so I decided to put Ballmer’s claims to the test and see if Microsoft this time had a workable Web version for iPad users. For grins, I also tested it on a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 running Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean.”

[ The iPad can be a great productivity tool, if you use InfoWorld’s picks for the best office iPad apps. We’ve also selected the best Android productivity apps. | Keep up on key mobile developments and insights with the Mobilize newsletter. ]

Office Web Apps this time does work on the iPad The good news is you can now actually use Office Web Apps on your iPad via the Safari browser (go to skydrive.live.com and sign in via your SkyDrive or Microsoft ID). You get the basic editing controls in Word, Excel, and Office needed for many documents, making Office Web Apps appropriate for touchup work. You don’t get revisions tracking in Word — a huge omission. PowerPoint supports all sorts of animation and transition effects, but you can’t insert graphics from your iPad or even from your SkyDrive account. It was also disconcerting to see the menu bar fly offscreen any time I was using the onscreen keyboard, forcing me to hide the keyboard to access menu options.

Also, you can’t print documents via AirPrint, but you can create a preview PDF that you open in iOS’s Quick Look facility and print from there. It’ll do, but it’s a workaround to what should exist natively.

Office Web Apps works with documents only on SkyDrive, so you can’t access files stored on other cloud storage services or stored locally on your iPad from it. The iOS SkyDrive app does share files with other iOS apps via the iOS Open In facility, so you can copy files from other apps (such as Photos, Dropbox, Box, Mail, GoodReader, Office2HD, and Apple’s iWork suite), but not from Quickoffice or Google Drive, which don’t support Open In or SkyDrive direct access. But having to switch between Office Web Apps in Safari and the SkyDrive app is a clunky method to access files.

As a Web app, Office Web Apps requires an Internet connection if you want to use it on your iPad, which means there are plenty of times you can’t use it. Plus, Office Web Apps is fairly slow even on a decent broadband network; this goes for both computers and iPads. There were often noticeable lags when opening menus or accessing files. On a cellular connection, Office Web Apps is often unusably slow.

Still, with a little patience, Office Web Aps was surprisingly capable and usable on the iPad’s screen — not what I expected from a company traditionally hostile to foreign platforms.

Office Web Apps lags behind native iOS apps and even some cloud apps It’s pretty clear that having a native version would be a much better idea, so you can work speedily, access native functions such as printing and files, and perhaps get more capabilities. Apple’s iWork suite (Pages, Keynote, and Numbers) and Google’s Quickoffice offer much more capabilities than Office Web Apps does, for example, and are much better suited to be your iPad editors for Office documents. Not only do they work regardless of your online status, they have user interfaces better suited for iOS (such as contextal onscreen keyboards and function palettes), integrate more with native capabiities, and offer more features — though less than Office on a PC or Mac.

Even as a Web app, Office Web Apps could be better. For example, the CloudOn service that runs Office on Windows Server and provides access via an iPad app offers more editing capabilities (including tracked changes in Word), saves your state if disconnected, and accesses files directly from Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, and SkyDrive. However, it does not support printing nor access to your iPad’s local images.

But Office Web Apps is light-years ahead of the basic editing capabilities in Google Drive, the cloud-based storage sevice whose mobile editing capabilities Google recently updated from unusable to basic. Google has a very long way to go to make Web-based document editing viable on tablets. It’s a good thing that last year it bought Quickoffice, the best iPad and Android office productivity app for Word and Excel files.

When all is said and done, Office Web Apps is fine for pinch-hitting work — and a big improvement over its last version. But in the reality of Web apps, CloudOn is better and free. The leading native iOS office apps Quickoffice and iWork are much better all around.

Office Web Apps still doesn’t work on Android If you have an Android tablet, don’t waste your time trying to use Office Web Apps. It won’t work. I tested it on Android 4.1.2 “Jelly Bean” running the stock Android Internet browser on a Samung Galaxy Note 10.1 and on Android 4.2.1 “Jelly Bean” running the Android Chrome browser on a Google Nexus 10. Although the main Office Web Apps page loads, documents often do not load properly; even when they do, the editing controls don’t appear and selecting text or cells doesn’t bring up any formatting options or show cell formulas.

Clearly, Microsoft thinks even less of Android than it does of iOS.

Microsoft is poised to make Office a has-been like it did Windows Microsoft may believe that Office Web Apps is good enough for iOS, but it’s wrong — just as it’s been wrong so many times when it comes to the new world of mobile “post-PC” computing. By the time it figures that out, I believe Quickoffice and iWork will have cemented their positions as the premier mobile office suites, leaving Office as an also-ran in mobile just as Microsoft let happen with Windows.

This article, “Office on the iPad is better but still not good enough,” 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.