The Verge:
The software maker has been inviting members of the media to a special cloud- and mobile-focused event in San Francisco on March 27th. Nadella is expected to discuss Microsoft’s “mobile first, cloud first” strategy, and there will be some major news ahead of the company’s Build conference in early April. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that the event will mark the introduction of Office for iPad.
Do you care?
Nope. And judging from the fact that Office for iPhone is only #26 of the top free Productivity apps, and appears nowhere near the top 200 overall charts, the rest of the world probably doesn’t care much either.
Office for iOS seems to be one of those things that tech sites like The Verge love to write about, but that real people don’t care about.
Yep
I would have handed over $100 to Microsoft for a full version of Office for iPad with full document compatibility in 2011 or 2012. Every year my need for it has reduced to the point of today where it would require me to make an effort to switch back to Office. Microsoft sacrificed Office at the altar of Windows. Now I couldn’t care less about either. The new iWork with full document compatibility has become my go-to solution. I always preferred Keynote to PowerPoint and now Pages is my preferred Word Processor. I’m not much of a Spreadsheet guy though. Hardly ever use spreadsheets.
So, do I care today? Not one bit.
Yes, I do care, asshole?
Is there a reason why you included the (pointless) curse word?
Absolutely I do care. This means iPad will be more than just a toy in the enterprise environment.
Tourette’s, please be sensitive of my condition.
And why is an anticipated product announcement, covered by you with “Do you care?”
Funny. We use over 300 iPads in an enterprise environment, and one thing we have certainly never missed is MS Office.
While I always though Apple is not good at cross-platform software (both iTunes and Safari are/were not really good on Windows), MS certainly takes the cake for being worst at it. The OS X version of OneNote released today does not even support drag and drop… in 2014.
FWIW, everybody else here did understand the question. It’s not only Tourette’s I guess?
It was asking a question of the readership. You may be reading too much into it.
Only about 2 years too late, and that’s being generous.
We’ll see how their brilliant effort can compare to the free GoogleDocs and iCloud iWork which already offer have 90% of Office’s total features, and 99.99% of features normal people care about.
Right, because goodness knows, enterprise has been avoiding deploying iPads like the plague.
/s
Countless musicians, doctors, pilots, architects, engineers, graphic designers, etc.. have said that iPad has fundamentally improved their respective workflows.
But, what do they know, the only thing that truly matters in ‘enterprise’ is having yet another app that allows us to type documents and maintain spreadsheets, amitite? /s
I dare you, I double dare you, ask the same way when the next Apple event is announced.
Pointless cursing and now, “double dares”? Thanks but I’m not twelve years old.
Why yes, showing some integrity is a feat I could only ask of a twelve years old.
Dude. You call me names for no apparent reason, don’t apologize for it and then try to goad me into doing what you want using the tactics of a small child.
And I’m the one lacking integrity?
Yeah. We’re done. Have a good evening.
I jeez, I feel so bad. I’m sorry.
Put me in the “no” column.
My company had already moved away from Office in favor of iWork for word processing and presentation software completely as of 2009. This made the transition to the iPad for much of our day-to-day that much simpler in 2010.
We hung on to Excel for a while after that, but the newest version of iWork (and – frankly – problems with the newest versions of Excel) has us closely examining whether we can’t get by with Numbers in its place.
I’m with others here – Microsoft is too late to the game.
Yes, I do care. If for no other reason than the fact that this will enable people who remained ignorant to the alternatives to stick with MS Office. Thus perpetuating the myth that if you want to do “real work” you need MS Office.
This will be unfortunate for those of us who are tired of making sure the documents we create are ugly and boring enough to be used by those with Office.
Don’t need it at this point, but it will probably be available through the Office365 subscription, so I’ll download it just in case.
Absolutely. Especially if it works with the same backend as one note. iCloud has gotten better, but MS is MUCH better at servers than Apple.
iWork can do a good job with most documents, but when you have edge cases or things that are assuming Word, not just “.docx”, then things can blow up.
I also find that one real advantage of Office files is I don’t have to zip them so that Gmail and others don’t mangle them to hell and gone.
No
I stopped using Word back when I still had a fat Mac. There’s nigh zero chance I’ll adopt Office for iPad. But I am interested in seeing if they bring anything interesting to the party.
I cared about as much as I did when iWork launched: 0.
I might if it carried substantially more features than iWork does on iOS and if it were available without a subscription.
But since I expect it’s just the iPhone app resized for iPad, come back to me with a better offer MS.
I didn’t even know that there was already an Office app for iPhone. That speaks volumes in itself. I’m not an enterprise user but everything I need to do is covered nicely by iWork.
No, not for me. The only potential value is with people for whom everything like a word processor is “Word” and every spreadsheet is “Excel”, and who hence haven’t explored other options on iPad.
I honestly cannot imagine what special value this brings. The only areas in which Office brings something special are things that REQUIRE a full desktop UI. The very act of making it scale to a touch interface would remove the complexity that defines the product that people envision. The only thing am expecting is native opening of file types, but beyond that nothing that strongly differentiates it from iWork.
I might be wrong, and I am certainly curious to see what Microsoft delivers. My expectations are low.
Yes, because it shows how iPads are killing the PC.
I care because it’s interesting and people will ask my opinions about it. Side Note – Trolls have no place in the comments on The Loop. Feeding them is a mistake. Ignoring them is the best strategy.
I would love to use Ms office on my iPad. Although my main system is windows, I use my iPad to do some light office work on the go with Pages and keynote. Problem is the font and spacing that sometimes mess up when I transfer the file to use on my pc. So I hope this Ms office for iPad would fix my problem.
The only way this release affects me is that I might hear fewer disparaging remarks about the iPad from that portion of the IT community that still believes it’s a frivolous toy. Unless they judge its feature set is deliberately crippled in some way, of course.
Ideally, this shuts a few of them up and removes their objections to deploying iPads in their companies, especially if it relies upon Microsoft’s cloud services.
Meh
if the ipad has been a toy (sigh. so tired) to you until now — youre doing it wrong.
agreed — “enterprise” != office. email and web apps are our top enterprise tools (followed by a VNC client for remote server admin). ipad is perfect for these on the go.
or removing them.
Speaking of dismissive, narrow-minded IT workers.