Microsoft Office For iPad Vs. iWork Vs. Google
Microsoft's Office for iPad wins praise from productivity software users, but is it right for you? We compare the free alternatives from Apple and Google.
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If you're a work-minded iPad user, Microsoft Office, Google Sheets, Google Docs, and Apple iWork are the most widely used productivity software options. But which one is the best fit for you?
More than a year before Microsoft released Office for iPad, many critics had already dismissed the apps, then still purely theoretical, as late to the party. Fast forward to today. Microsoft's iPad suite has earned better reviews than almost anyone expected, especially after the company's rudimentary Office Mobile app for smartphones. Users downloaded Office for iPad 12 million times in its first week, and more than 27 million in its first month and a half.
The numbers are impressive, but it's unclear how much they've helped Microsoft's bottom line. Office iPad apps are free, but to create and edit documents users need an Office 365 subscription. Are those downloads actually translating into paying customers? Microsoft hasn't said, partly because it offers a 30-day trial to new Office for iPad users, which muddies download-to-subscriber conversion rates.
Still, it's safe to say Office for iPad hasn't hurt Office 365's momentum. Office 365 Home Premium subscriptions totaled 3.5 million earlier this year but have since jumped to more than 4.4 million. Microsoft has not disclosed figures for either Office 365 Personal, perceived by many as its most iPad-centric plan, nor various student-oriented options -- but with Home Premium evidently rolling along since Office for iPad debuted, it's likely the others have seen a boost too.
Does all that mean Office is your best bet for iPad productivity? Not necessarily. It's important to remember why critics were skeptical of Office for iPad before it had even been announced. At the time, analysts pointed out that iPad users had spent several years becoming acquainted with Office alternatives -- and with the idea that they needn't pay for Office when free products could do the job. Given this context, it seemed Microsoft's window to capitalize on the iPad's success had largely closed.
These concerns no longer seem so urgent -- but for individual users, the logic is still valid. Apple's iWork suite is free with every new iOS device, and Google's productivity apps are free, period. Office deserves its praise -- but does it deserve your money? That depends.
Office is ubiquitous among PC users, which gives the iPad version certain advantages -- namely, a familiar UI that requires little retraining, and the assurance that document formatting will look the way it's supposed to. But if you don't need to collaborate with Office users, or if your collaborations involve simply formatted documents, you might find iWork or Google Drive more attractive.
There are other considerations. Do you spend more time creating presentations or working with spreadsheets? Is word processing your priority? Do you want to use templates to keep things simple? Do you want to use your iPad to edit and review content, or to create it?
If that sounds overwhelming, don't worry. We've broken down the options. Explore our slideshow to learn the details. If you already have a favorite, or want to share advice, please join the discussion in the comments field.
Apple generally has a reputation for intuitive products, but to many users, Word will feel more natural than Pages. To some extent, Word will be easier to learn simply because most users are familiar with Word on other devices. In other cases, however, Word's UI is simply clearer, regardless of the user's prior experience. In Word, undo and redo buttons are plainly visible in the top left of the screen, for example, but iWork's UI presents only the undo function. To redo something, you have to hold down the undo button until it switches to its secondary function. The page-footnote control is also unexpectedly on the digital keyboard.
Pages is still fairly intuitive, though it takes a few minutes to feel comfortable. Whereas Word revolves around clearly labeled ribbon tabs, Pages nests tools under minimalistic icons, which can be confusing. The top-right menus in Pages include three icons that are repeated throughout the iWork suite -- a paintbrush, a "+" icon, and a wrench, all of which expand into larger menus when touched. The paintbrush includes style, list, and layout controls; the "+" handles charts, graphs, shapes, and photos; and the wrench includes tools such as change tracking, password management, and printing.
Pages boasts many useful features. Its keyboard includes several tools, allowing a user to quickly change font attributes or text alignment without moving up to the primary menus in the top-right corner of the screen. Word lacks such a keyboard. Pages, like Word, also includes spell checking and search-and-replace functions. Pages initially had the edge when it comes to printing, but Microsoft quickly added that function to its iPad apps.
Pages offers a wider, richer, and more varied array of templates than Word. Given that creating documents on a tablet is more difficult than doing so on a PC, some users might use templates to cut down overall labor. Then again, a lot of people use tablets to review and edit documents -- not to create them.
For collaboration, Pages offers several options, but in an Office-dominated world, it's far from perfect. For more about collaboration, see the final slide.
Google used to house Docs, Sheets, and Slides -- its word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation offerings -- within Google Drive. Earlier this year, however, the company broke out Docs and Sheets as independent apps. Google, which is ostensibly relegating Drive to pure storage duties, promised that Slides will follow soon.
Docs (and Sheets, for that matter) offers offline editing -- so no, you don't have to worry about the long-running criticism that Google services require the Internet. When you're connected, sharing and collaborating functions are simple; they work in the iPad app just like they do in the desktop version.
Unfortunately, Docs is otherwise comparatively sparse. Basic formatting tools are provided -- but you won't find support for headers, footers, spell check, graphics, or many of the other capabilities offered by both Word and Pages.
For serious spreadsheet work on the iPad, Excel is tough to beat. Like Word, Excel includes a ribbon whose neatly arranged tabs contain a deep list of features. Notably, Excel includes more than 400 formulas and a variety of templates. It also includes a special keyboard geared toward numeric entry and supports third-party keyboards. Excel for iPad isn't quite as full-featured as the desktop version. You won't find support for macros, and though you can view existing pivot tablets, you can't modify them or create new ones.
Numbers is highly polished. Features range from attractive templates to help beginners get started, to a deep well of built-in formulas for advanced users. That said, most power users will use their iPads to review or modify spreadsheets -- not to create them from scratch. For that simple reason, Excel likely has an edge over Numbers, even on iPads.
On desktops, Excel is the business standard, while Numbers is (at most) a niche player. Most professionals use Excel not only because it offers the deepest toolset, but also because everyone else uses it. That's potentially problematic for Numbers; the app can open and export Excel files, but the translations aren't perfect. This challenge can be avoided, but many options add steps to collaborator workflows. See the last page in this slideshow for more.
Collaboration concerns aside, Numbers isn't quite as powerful as Excel; it includes 100+ fewer formulas, for example. But it still offers enough functionality to satisfy most users. It includes four data-entry keyboards: one for numbers, currency, and percentages; one for date and time; one for text; and one for formulas and functions. Each features large, touch-friendly keys, though Excel's UI is a bit cleaner. Numbers also includes a variety of attractive templates and uses icon-based menus like those in Pages. For newbies, Numbers is fairly user-friendly, but for people already used to Excel, UI differences could be frustrating.
Like Docs, Google Sheets is now a standalone app, independent from Google Drive. Feature-wise and aesthetically, it's more austere than Numbers or Excel -- but if you have an older iPad, it's also the only one of the trio that's free. Moreover, Sheets makes sharing and collaboration easy; the function works on the iPad basically like it does on the desktop.
Otherwise, you'll find the basics, including printing and cell fills -- but no more than that. You'd better know all the formulas you want to use, for example, because Sheets offers none of the equations and guides that are built into Numbers and Excel.
On iPads, PowerPoint stands out in presentation mode. When the tablet is paired to a television or monitor, if you press down on the iPad's display, a red "laser pointer" dot appears on the mirrored screen. You can also draw on the screen and otherwise apply annotations while in this mode, allowing you to create more emphasis during a presentation. None of these marks can be saved, however.
PowerPoint for iPads includes all the basic formatting tools but includes a few annoying limitations. The app offers fewer templates than Apple's Keynote, for example, and most of what's offered feels comparatively utilitarian. PowerPoint also offers charts and graphs that aren't quite as dynamic (or, depending on your viewpoint, as ostentatious) as those in Apple's version. That said, PowerPoint's familiar set of slide transitions is available, and it's generally quick and easy to create presentations.
Keynote was originally designed to be a presentation tool for famously demanding Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and was only later converted to a commercial product. As that lineage might suggest, Keynote makes it easy to create beautiful projects. It offers a large library of templates, most of which are richer than those in PowerPoint. Though Microsoft's app includes a lot of transitions, Keynote includes even more. Apple's app includes a laser-pointer feature like PowerPoint's, as well as the ability to annotate slides during a presentation. With more text styles and animations than the competition, Keynote is compelling. It can even export PowerPoint files, but don't expect perfect conversions, especially for complex projects.
Google hasn't yet released Slides, its presentation product, as a standalone iPad app. You can use the Google Drive app to view slides and associated speaker notes, but you can't edit. Google is expected to offer a Slides app relatively soon.
It's been available for longer than the other Office apps, but Microsoft's OneNote is still worth mentioning. Designed for note-taking, OneNote is organized like a binder: notebooks contain tabs, and tabs contain pages. Unlike Word, which imposes a degree of order and linearity to your workflow, OneNote is completely freeform. You can put text, links, pictures, and other content anywhere; just touch the screen to begin working in a new portion of the page. OneNote can sync to OneDrive, and because a OneDrive app is available for OS X, Windows, and Android, it's easy to get your OneNote notes from your iPad onto all of your devices. That said, for the most advanced OneNote experience, check out the Surface Pro 3.
Boiled down, Google Docs offers the least functionality -- but it includes just enough for many people to get work done, ties into a huge user base, makes sharing easy, and is free.
Apple's iWork offers a lot more functionality than Google's apps. It could certainly satisfy most users -- unless they need to collaborate with Office users (a likelihood), in which case things get trickier -- see the next slide. Moreover, iWork is only free on new iOS devices. If you have an older iPad, you'll need to head to the App Store and shell out $9.99 for each app.
Office for iPads offers almost as much power as its desktop antecedent. Overall, it's probably the most powerful iPad suite, though iWork has its bright spots. Then again, Office is also far and away the most expensive. Office 365 Personal entitles you to all the Office apps, on one tablet and one PC. It costs as little as $69.99 per year. Office 365 Home ups the device limit to five PCs and five tablets and runs as little as $99.99 annually.
Is Office worth the extra cost when alternatives provide so much for so little? It depends on your needs, particularly the extent to which you need to collaborate with Office users. But Microsoft throws in some extras to sweeten the pot. Office 365 Personal comes with 20 GB of OneDrive storage. The Home edition comes with 20 GB for each of five accounts, for 100 GB total.
Office 365 also means you get access to the newest versions of Office as soon as they become available. That might not seem like a big deal if you're used to the old Microsoft, which released big products once every three or four years. Today's Microsoft continually pushes new features via the cloud. In the last year alone, the company has released dozens of updates and new features for Office 365 products. Office for iPad originally lacked support for printing, for instance, but Microsoft took care of the oversight only a few weeks later. Whether these new additions are worth opening your wallet, of course, is up to you.
Productivity apps are partly about what you can do alone, and partly about collaborating with others. In this regard, Google, Microsoft, and Apple's respective apps are hit and miss.
Google provides access across almost all platforms. Anecdotally speaking, it also offers the smoothest real-time co-authoring. If you and your collaborators use Google's browser-based apps on your PCs, you'll be able to easily move content to your iPad via Google Drive. File management on the iPad, however, is a mess, especially if you're looking for a file you haven't opened recently.
If you use Google's app and need to collaborate with people who use iWork, you'll have to resort to workarounds. The desktop version of Google Drive can convert and export Office files, but the iPad version can't. Plus, even if you use the desktop to force Office files into Google, the conversions are often far from perfect.
Apple's Pages, Numbers, and Keynote can export Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, respectively, though the results aren't always perfect. You can open Office files with iWork apps, too. Interestingly, if you have both iWork and Office installed on the same iPad, iWork lets you open its files in Office, though the reverse isn't true. In all cases, however, the translations between Office and iWork are often imperfect.
If you're in an all iWork environment, it's easy to move files across devices. If you need to include non-iWork collaborators, they'll be stuck with Apple's browser-based iWork for iCloud, which is still in beta. From within any given iWork app, it's easy to send collaborators a link with which they can access and edit the file in a browser, with support for real-time co-authoring. Apple's iCloud apps are free and feature most basic tools, but they're not as powerful as the full versions. iWork can also convert files into PDFs -- a nice perk.
Microsoft's Office doesn't support file types from competing platforms. Still, if you're in an all-Office environment, it's easy to open your existing documents, either from SharePoint or OneDrive. If someone emails you, say, a .docx file, you can also launch Word directly from iOS's Mail app. Office also lets you share easily, via attachments or links. Links redirect to Office Online, which supports real-time co-authoring and allows non-Office users to join your projects. Office Online offers a decent Word and Excel experience, but PowerPoint needs work.
Productivity apps are partly about what you can do alone, and partly about collaborating with others. In this regard, Google, Microsoft, and Apple's respective apps are hit and miss.
Google provides access across almost all platforms. Anecdotally speaking, it also offers the smoothest real-time co-authoring. If you and your collaborators use Google's browser-based apps on your PCs, you'll be able to easily move content to your iPad via Google Drive. File management on the iPad, however, is a mess, especially if you're looking for a file you haven't opened recently.
If you use Google's app and need to collaborate with people who use iWork, you'll have to resort to workarounds. The desktop version of Google Drive can convert and export Office files, but the iPad version can't. Plus, even if you use the desktop to force Office files into Google, the conversions are often far from perfect.
Apple's Pages, Numbers, and Keynote can export Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, respectively, though the results aren't always perfect. You can open Office files with iWork apps, too. Interestingly, if you have both iWork and Office installed on the same iPad, iWork lets you open its files in Office, though the reverse isn't true. In all cases, however, the translations between Office and iWork are often imperfect.
If you're in an all iWork environment, it's easy to move files across devices. If you need to include non-iWork collaborators, they'll be stuck with Apple's browser-based iWork for iCloud, which is still in beta. From within any given iWork app, it's easy to send collaborators a link with which they can access and edit the file in a browser, with support for real-time co-authoring. Apple's iCloud apps are free and feature most basic tools, but they're not as powerful as the full versions. iWork can also convert files into PDFs -- a nice perk.
Microsoft's Office doesn't support file types from competing platforms. Still, if you're in an all-Office environment, it's easy to open your existing documents, either from SharePoint or OneDrive. If someone emails you, say, a .docx file, you can also launch Word directly from iOS's Mail app. Office also lets you share easily, via attachments or links. Links redirect to Office Online, which supports real-time co-authoring and allows non-Office users to join your projects. Office Online offers a decent Word and Excel experience, but PowerPoint needs work.
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