For eons now, the scuttlebutt about a
version of Microsoft Office for Apple‘s iOS devices has just kept on coming. In
November of 2011, Office for the iPad was reported to be in the works. In February of 2012, it was
allegedly going to arrive shortly. Then versions for iPhone
and iPad (and Android) were supposed to arrive in early 2013. Unless they
weren’t going to show up until October 2014.
Whew. If you tuned out the rumors at
some point along the way, I don’t blame you. But now there’s news about Office
for iOS which is, indeed, news: Microsoft is releasing an iPhone version today.
Like the Windows Phone version–which it closely resembles–this one is
officially known as Office Mobile and includes pocket-sized editions of Word,
Excel and PowerPoint. It’s live in the Apple App Store as you read this.
(Microsoft provided me with the app in pre-release form.)
Office for the iPhone is a free
download. But that doesn’t mean that Microsoft is giving away this new version
of one of its crown jewels. To use it, you need to be a subscriber to the
company’s Office
365 service, which gives you access to Office 2013 on up to five
Windows PCs, among other benefits. There’s a one-month
free trial, but after that, the home version of Office 365 is $9.99
a month or $99.99 a year. (Paying customers are entitled to install Office
Mobile on up to five iPhones.)
Both Office 2013 and Office Mobile use
Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud service for document storage, letting you shuttle
files between PC and phone without giving it much thought, opening and saving
files on either device as if they were both connected to the same hard disk. If
someone e-mails you an Office document as a file attachment, you can open it in
Office Mobile, then save it to SkyDrive; if you need to e-mail a document
that’s on SkyDrive, you can do that, too.
As for native file support, the fact
that Office Mobile is Office means it can open, edit and save files created by
full-fledged Office without need for conversion, which helps it sidestep the
sort of compatibility issues that can result in glitches such as wonky-looking
PowerPoint slides in competitive phone suites. (Usually, at least: I encountered
minor issues with some very complex files, and Word Mobile refused to let me
edit one particularly elaborate Word document that was rife with fancy
formatting.)
Microsoft, reasonably enough, doesn’t
expect Office Mobile users to be performing heavy-duty wrangling of words,
numbers and slides. Documents open up in a view-only mode; if you switch into
editing mode, you get only a sparse set of tools. In some cases, rival apps do
more: Apple’s Pages, unlike Word Mobile, lets you insert images, check spelling
and get a word count. And you can’t add comments to Word Mobile documents, a
feature which is available in the Windows Phone version.
What you can do is futz around with
text and information in cells, insert simple charts into spreadsheets, shuffle
around slides and perform other minor tweaks, then save everything back to
SkyDrive. You can also create Word and Excel documents — but not PowerPoint
presentations — from scratch. It’s not world-changing, but it’s straightforward
and useful.
All of which leaves one
still-intriguing question: What about Office for iPad? For now, it remains a
vaporous, possibly imaginary product. I asked Microsoft’s Julia White about it,
and she said that the company’s recommendation is that iPad owners use its
browser-based Office Web Apps – which do indeed work quite
well on an iPad, as long as you’re connected to the Internet. (I also inquired
about the possibility of an Android version; she said that the company is
focused on the iPhone one for now.)
Office Mobile for the iPad, of course,
could still pop up in the future. I wouldn’t count on it doing so any time
soon, though: Microsoft hasn’t released a truly tablet-centric version of
Office for any platform yet, and it would be a shocker if it arrived first on
Apple’s tablet rather than Windows 8 and Windows RT.
If Office for iPad does become a
reality, I think we now know the answer to a question that pundits have been wondering about. It won’t be so cheap that it
conditions people to think that Office shouldn’t cost any more than a
garden-variety iOS app. Instead, like Office Mobile for iPhone, it’ll be a
bonus for Office 365 subscribers, thereby (theoretically) buttressing Office’s
profits rather than threatening them.
Hey, Microsoft may be willing to make
owners of Apple devices happy, but it’s not going to cater to all of them. Just
the ones who love Office so much that they want to use it everywhere, and are
willing to pay a monthly fee for the privilege.
Source : techland.time.com
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