We know you’ve been wanting it, and starting today, you can download Word, Excel and PowerPoint for iPad from the App Store. The apps have the robust capabilities and familiar look and feel that is unmistakably Office, while offering a fantastic touch experience built from the ground up for iPad. With the free versions of the apps, you can read your Word documents, view your Excel data and present with PowerPoint. Your documents will look as good as they do on your PC and Mac^A(R), and better than ever on your iPad. With an Office 365 subscription, you can edit and create new documents with the iPad.
It looks pretty good, and as a heavy Office users, I can’t wait until this hits Android tablets. On a related note: Office for phones (both iOS and Android) has gone completely free.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that iOS got touch Office before Windows. I feel like I’m in the twilight zone.
Is Office for iOS as feature-complete as the desktop version?
I’m pretty sure, at least originally, the goal for the Metro Office was 100% feature-completeness.
I have a better question….why? why would you want this? I could see maybe having a simple editor to do basic fixes on the fly but MS Office is an extremely complex and feature rich piece of software, I really don’t see that translating to touch very well.
I’m sure that somebody will chime in about how “tablets are used in business now” but I would counter that I see tablets all the time in business…using premade apps that condense most of the interaction into “press the checkbox/fill in the blank” kind of stuff that we were making over a decade ago with VB+Access. Sure there are plenty of jobs where you can do something like that, inventory, medical, but in all the places where I’ve seen tablets used when it comes time for serious office work? Its back to the comfy desktop with the big screen and large keyboard.
I have a feeling once the newness wears off they will be lucky if they get even double digits, more likely somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-7% of iOS users will want to actually try to do heavy office tasks on a pad.
Office on my handheld? Blech! Beyond compatibility, I don’t see the point.
The point, at least for Microsoft, is to preserve and promote their office format. As long as people can properly open an office file on their phone it will continue to be an “acceptable” format to use generally. If people can’t open office files on their phone it discourages them from sending them and using them, and therefor Microsoft Office.
iWorks is free on all macs and iOS devices and can open, edit and save Office format documents. When iWorks went free it called Microsoft’s bluff and they realised they were in danger of losing control of a standard (in mobile but soon mobile will be bigger and drive desktop) that they had created.
Have you seen the explosive sales of iOS Office so far? All four of the top iPad apps measured by download volume in America are Microsoft products right now (I never thought I would type that sentence). Even more astonishingly, Microsoft Word for iPad has become the No. 6 highest grossing iPad app in the United States and in Germany Word is the third biggest grossing app on iPad,
If you log into iCloud.com you can also use iWork’s for free using any modern web browser.
anybody has an idea how the port works? did they really translated everything to object C? Wouldn’t that be a complete rewrite? or did they somehow get some own (c++?) libs installed on iOS?
iOS apps can link C/C++ libraries just fine… You do not have to port them to Objective C to use them. Even linking to a COM library is not out of the question – I have never seen it done but COM is rather simple and there is no reason that I can think of that it couldn’t work.
My guess is the UI was done from scratch, and the libraries they needed were pilfered from the OSX version of Office. That is my guess anyway.
See this. http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2014/0068547.html
Replied to wrong post… Ignore
Edited 2014-03-28 04:28 UTC
HA! That is some ironic shit right there. A Microsoft patent for cross platform development…
Seriously I didn’t read it enough (and don’t plan to) to make any kind of judgement as to whether or not there is anything of merit in there. Maybe there is, but I doubt it. Anyway, it certainly is good for a chuckle.
Welcome to modern development methodologies Redmond – we’ve missed you for the last 20 years…
Ok I lied… Couldn’t help but read it. Its XUL for touch devices. Yawn. I would say Mozilla should be upset, but they didn’t do it first either (by a long shot).
This is seriously comical – I hate f*cking patents… Can we please make them go away???
On a related note: Didn’t someone recently complain that Firefox for Metro sucked because it didn’t use native UI components? If this patent is an indication of how Microsoft did Office for iOS it isn’t using native UI either. I wonder if it will fair any better…
Edited 2014-03-28 04:39 UTC
I don’t know if we’re reading the same patent, but this doesn’t look like anything XUL related at all. It seems to be concerning the intricacies of structuring your application into platform specific and platform independent parts, the key part is knowing where that separation exists, and providing examples of how cloud services play into this scenario and how changes in the model are propagated to the respective environments.
Its not easy stuff from experience, a few primitive frameworks out there help like MVVMCross (which Nokia used to port some WP apps to the Nokia X) but its still a lot of architectural planning, replanning, and head pounding.
Android, iOS and WP aren’t superficially different, they have fundamentally different application models with different life cycles. I think you oversimplify the problem due to your bias against patents.
To answer your question though, Office for iOS uses native UI and all four products are topping iOS charts.
C++ is currently the black swan of mobile portability.
It is available out of the box in all vendor SDKs alongside their main platform language, and yet it tends to be ignored, mainly because it is cool to bash it.
Granted, it has a few warts, many of them fixed with C++11/14 standards, which make it quite productive actually.
I spent 15+ years in C++. I know it is ‘productive actually’.
However …
Objective C is and it’s kits are much tighter, better designed, produce smaller code ( and ofcourse their 100% portable since it’s all Apple stuff ).
C# is like Objective C but for Microsoft stuff.
Java is ‘safer’, much more portable, and has comprehensive well document and well supported libraries across most devices.
Ruby and Python are much less verbose and easier to read and you can still get exceptional performance through the occasional C extension.
If your building a library or extension C is much more portable and produces much smaller code.
C++, outside of the game industry is simply not as good an alternatives anymore which is why no one wants to use it and even there high level languages like LUA and even Javascript ( like in Unity, not like in a webpage ) are taking up more and more of the stack.
I know C++ since the C++ ARM days, remember those?
Actually I favor safe system programming languages that follow Modula-2 lineage. I also had the pleasure of doing system programming development in GC enabled languages like Oberon.
However, I am also pragmatic and only care about official supported languages in the vendor SDKs for hobby work.
Objective-C. Smalltalk semantics are great. Unfortunately destroyed by C compatibility compromises, forcing me to type @ and [] everywhere.
GNUStep is still playing catching up with NeXTStep.
C, well I don’t care about portable macro assemblers designed to be unsafe by default. Always avoid using it, unless it was a customer/teacher requirement to do so.
Not to mention that it isn’t supported in WP, given that WinRT is C++ based.
C# is great, but I don’t want to buy Xamarin stuff for hobby coding.
Java only runs on Android and is a Java 6 fork. With Java 7 being supported only in Android 4.4 devices.
RoboVM helps with native compilation for iOS. However not everything works currently and WP support is non-existant.
So this leaves me with C++, as only common language among all SDKs.
Outside mobile world, you are right. I stop doing C++ back in 2006. We are a JVM/.NET shop nowadays.
Ever used Qt? It’s awesome for cross platform development and hides 95% of the crap in C++. And now with the support for iOS and Android (and Blackberry and Windows Phone) you can write your apps on Windows, compile and test on Windows, and only do some small platform specific things that aren’t covered by the base library. The value of being able to test 95% of the functionality of our app on Windows is huge, as we the build/test cycle is way faster than waiting for a device or a simulator. Then it goes on the devices to do those little platform specific things (local notifications, text to speech, in app purchase, etc).
Wasn’t it still true you need an Apple machine to submit it for review to the Apple app store ?
Yes, but with multi-platform frameworks it can be relegated to a common build machine to the whole team, instead of requiring each developer to have one.
That is how we do it.
The latest version of Office for Mac partially used Cocoa so I don^A't think that is a problem for Microsoft.
When the first rumors came out, I’m pretty sure they I said they would go the 360 route. MS doesn’t lose revenue streams this way if people don’t adopt the WinRT/Win phone platforms.
iOS got it’s first real MS app before WinRT. WTF
Sadly, I don’t have an iPad nor Office365 subs so I can’t see how full this tablet app is.
But that doesn’t surprises me. I saw the live stream. It was like watching an Apple conference or TheVerge staff reunion.
I wouldn’t exactly call this a free offer, since an Office360 prescription is required to create and edit documents
Edited 2014-03-28 02:49 UTC
If someone was looking for a reason to buy an iPad (or a tablet in general), now that’s your opportunity.
This is hilarious.
If you have to buy a subscription to create new documents it’s not free.
I don’t rate Microsoft very highly, but I have always been positive about excel. It’s a great package.
Since I had a 360 account, I decided give excel for the iPad a go!
But sadly this first iPad release is only, at best, above average. It is generally quite slick, but lacking so many features… I still find myself defaulting to other spreadsheet packages, quick office is very good.
It’s a fun world now, where Microsoft have to compete on the merits of the quality of their software, rather than just churning out crap through their monopoly.
Hopefully MS will build on this release and make some outstanding software!
I have mixed feelings for this. On the plus side:
+ Microsoft sort-of accepts that there ARE other operating systems which are here to stay, and it tries to cater them.
+ More software = more choice = good
On the negative side:
– this keeps the MS Office closed standard stanglehold alive.
– meaning less room for LibreOffice and others (G Docs, QuickOffice, Pages, and so on) to improve their performance
– less chance of open standards acceptance
– less innovation = less choice = bad
On the WTF side:
– who is going to edit Office documents on his phone or tablet?
– “documents” are an old fashioned idea. Perkament, paper, and now we have .docx-files and .pdf-files. Google Docs is more modern, WordPress is even better – just write it on a website and send people the link to it.
– formatting is overrated. People use having wordprocessors to write very simple lists that could be written on a simple editor
– Microsoft make an messy mixture of cloud service and local software (“Yes is it a cloud service, but no you cannot use it with a Linux/Chromium machine).
– this is the end of the “Services & Devices” dream. Either you make devices (Samsung, Lenovo) or you make services (Google, who sold off Motorola).
Edited 2014-03-30 20:31 UTC
People around the web have been asking why iOS was first and not Microsoft’s own tablet devices or even Android. One would assume Microsoft would choose their own platform over another if only to legitimize it… or Android because it has greater market share.
Certainly Microsoft would have been privy to the market research company’s reports long before hand and saw the trend.
I asked this question too and found the answer.
According to IDC, most of Android’s increased user base came primarily as a result of “tier two” class tablets, ones that feature processors as slow as 600 MHz and include devices that they describe as “kids tablets and toys”
These sort of “tablets” make up an incredible two thirds of the global tablet numbers numbers reported by market research firms, clarifying that it’s the recognition of these devices as “tablets” that has affected iOS and Android’s “market share” and not competition from tablet makers like Samsung and Microsoft, both of whom continue to struggle far behind Apple in their tablet sales.
In addition to not being fooled by public market research firms’ data insisting that iPad sales are tumbling off a cliff, Microsoft is also well aware of its own anemic Surface sales and the competitive pressure being exerted by Apple’s iPad sales against its partner’s Tablet PCs and PCs in general.
Simply put, Microsoft knows what hardware its current and potential customers are using and made the most obvious selection.
Edited 2014-03-31 03:16 UTC
“as slow as 600 MHz”
Hah! So funny!
I had a Sharp Zaurus that ran a 233 MHz ARM and its Office apps were very quick and responsive.
What makes a 600 MHz tablet slow is bad software. A modern 600 MHz ARM CPU is capable of exceeding the performance of the desktop computers that ran Windows 98 and Office 97 in EVERY WAY. [1]
[1]: http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/linpack%20results.htm
Edited 2014-04-01 00:24 UTC
I once had a computer that was 80 MHz early PPC processor and it too was quick and responsive. Were I to run today’s applications on it, (compatibility issues aside) I couldn’t do much.
Applications are created to fulfill a specific need. The tablets in question were meant to exclusively run children’s applications, a web browser and video. For this, the processor is more than sufficient but to run the same apps that the latest processors require is a losing game.
To associate these tablets with their more powerful ones is misleading as it compels people to think that apps from a certain platform has the potential to run on a large install base and that simply is not the case.
this is a complicated one – i feel alot of different ways about office on ipad.
i will get the free ones for my ipad but i don’t know that i’d ever need them. maybe if i’m on the couch or the throne and i need to see some serious word doc, like a contract.
i haven’t had to pay for my office subscription but it’s mainly because i’ve trained my windows boss to know that much of his dev team is on mac and would prefer open file formats.
that said, i can imagine one of my business connections needing me to have one, and maybe paying for it.
yet the office clones and format exchangers have been enough for me for about 5 years now.
i just don’t know. i don’t think people are going to buy more ipads because office is on it, but i can see that as one less reason to get a windows tablet.
i really wish microsoft would focus on software only and really wow us with some great software technology, and leave the hardware to companies far better at it.