Michal Ždanský After many years of waiting for Office users, this Microsoft office software will finally be available for the iPad. At a press event in San Francisco today, the company unveiled its tablet version, also dropping the Microsoft Surface exclusivity that Microsoft previously touted in its ads. Until now, Office was only available on the iPhone and only offered basic document editing options for Office 365 subscribers.
The iPad version is set to go much further. The apps themselves will again be free and offer the ability to view documents and launch PowerPoint presentations from the device. Other features require an Office 365 subscription, with Microsoft recently introducing a new program Our Team, which will allow individuals to get Office on all available platforms (Windows, Mac, iOS) for a monthly fee of $6,99 or $69,99 or a year. The service currently has over 3,5 million subscribers.
The three well-known Word, Excel and Powerpoint editors will be part of Office, but as separate applications compared to the iPhone version. They will offer a user interface with familiar ribbons, but everything is adapted for touch. At the presentation, Microsoft demonstrated automatic reordering of text when dragging an image, similar to what Numbers can do. Excel, on the other hand, will have a special bar above the keyboard for easy insertion of equations and formulas. The application will also be able to render changes in charts in real time. In PowerPoint, individual slides can be edited and presented directly from the iPad. There will be support for OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) across all applications.
Office for iPad, or individual applications (Word, Excel, Power point), are available in the App Store now. The new CEO Satya Nadella, who approaches Microsoft's software products more like services, probably had a big influence on the launch of Office on the iPad. On the contrary, Steve Ballmer wanted to keep Office as an exclusive software for tablets with Windows RT and Windows 8. General manager of Office, Julia White, assured at the presentation that these are not just ported applications from Windows, but software tailored to the iPad. In addition to Office for iPad, Microsoft should also release new version for Mac, after all, we already received the application last week OneNote for Apple computers.
What I regret about Microsoft and because of that I switched to iWork, which suits me perfectly, is Office 365, which costs almost 2500 CZK per year. The fact that you can't buy a one-time license on the iPad is useless to me. Yes, by paying 250 CZK per month, I can have 5 licenses for different OS, but I bought iWork and I don't pay anything anymore, and certainly not for just one year. Pages, Numbers and Keynote are enough for me and I have a usable office suite with iCloud sync on all my Macs, iPads and iPhones.
I won't buy it either for the same reasons.
Let's face it, Microsoft didn't disappoint again :-), its financial policy is going well....
So why would he give Office to the competition for free?? That wouldn't make any sense.
Great, I've been waiting for this for a long time. Because of the workstation, I am forced to use Microsoft services, and now that I have it on my iPad, I am satisfied.
Don't know how to set the appearance (insertion options, display, etc.) on the iPad like on a PC? I need more options for school than what is shown so far. Thanks
The cheapest version does not cost 2500 but more than a thousand less. The Personal tariff is the cheapest, which includes the Office package for Windows, Mac and iOS with the possibility of full-fledged editing and creating documents. The monthly fee is USD 6,99, or an annual subscription of USD 69 (approx. CZK 99) is offered.
I'm sorry, it seems like a fairly fair price for an excellent product with an entire ecosystem that is definitely more usable than Apple's. 20GB free on onedrive, with which I can work to the full - unlike iCloud, plus 60 minutes of free calls from Skype to landlines. I'm not talking about compatibility with the rest of the world. Students have a subscription for 2 liters for 4 years.
For freelancers, complete comfort. I pay something like 3 thousand per year for the entire office package including Outlook, ACCESS, Publisher, etc. and a full-fledged exchange server, which allows me to connect the window and apple ecosystem completely without problems - again, I say, a completely fair price. And the sales results of office365 suggest that this is not just my impression.
I agree with your opinion, in addition, Office for iPhone is completely free from today!!
So now all that's missing is for APPLE to finally add full-fledged mouse support in iOS 8 (hopefully it will work) and more reasonable support for the resolution of an external monitor (it probably won't work :-( ) and I'm throwing my NB DELL away....
The real question: is Office worth it or not? Is it significantly better than iWorks, or is it for people weaned on Office?
The stupid thing is that you have to have Office 365
I have office 365 the other day, so I decided to write down some of my findings. I guess you already know about all the positive things, and what about the negative ones, that is, apart from the price?
What bothers me the most is the impossibility of any re-export to another application (so you can bypass it via the OneDrive app, but it's too complicated).
I would also imagine some kind of saving directly to the iPad, some automatically downloaded folder for offline use (for offline use it is only possible to use previously opened files or things copied via the iTunes app on the computer).
Then I came across the fact that I need to know exactly what type of file I am opening. In this case, I would either combine these three applications into one or at least somehow automatically open the correct one when selected in another.
As a result, Microsoft wants us to start using its cloud storage, which I don't want at all. It's actually a tax that microsoft penalizes me for using their solution (windows with office) but then a device with ios.
If Pages, Numbers and Keynote knew all fonts, I probably wouldn't use Office 365.
(free month trial version: http://office.microsoft.com/cs-cz/bezplatna-zkusebni-verze-vyzkousejte-si-produkty-microsoft-office-2013-a-office-365-FX102858196.aspx?WT%2Eintid1=ODC_CSCZ_FX010064710_XT103927624).