Microsoft Office for iPad review

Evan Gower April 16, 2014

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Microsoft Office has been available on the Mac for decades, so the lack of an iOS version has been a frustration for iPad fans. Now, Office for iPad is finally here, bringing Word, Excel and PowerPoint to the platform, alongside the already-available OneNote.

Let’s make one thing clear from the start, though: the Office for iPad apps aren’t standalone apps in the way that the iWork apps are. They’re free to download from the App Store, and free to use if you simply want to view and download documents from your OneDrive store. To exploit their full capabilities, however, you’ll need to have an Office 365 subscription already, or sign up to one – at a cost of at least £7.99 per month.

Office for iPad review: Word

At first glance, Word looks awfully pared back compared to the Windows version. The bustling ribbon interface we’re used to has been downsized to just five tabs with a handful of options in each. Some adaptation to the smaller screen was obviously necessary, but with no way to insert fixtures such as SmartArt, charts or drop caps, some may feel cheated.

Once you get going, however, that feeling dies away. There are 15 templates to choose from when creating a new document, and even if you’re starting from a blank canvas, there are enough tools to make documents look smart. There’s a wide selection of fonts, too – although some of these aren’t included with Office for Windows, and will get substituted when you open your document in Word 2013. This is disappointing, and undermines Microsoft’s promise to preserve formatting no matter what device you’re working on.

Inserting photos or shapes into documents is simple, and Word for iPad automatically reflows text around images as you move or resize them. The PC-like bounding boxes and handles work well enough, although we prefer the pinch-to-zoom and rotate facilities in Apple’s Pages app.

Word for iPad shows its real power when opening heavily formatted documents created on a PC. In our tests, Pages made an absolute car crash of an image- and table-heavy report produced in Word 2013, but Word for iPad preserved it beautifully. The only hint of trouble was a warning that some fonts weren’t supported – even though the document used only staples such as Calibri and Cambria.

Opening files stored on your OneDrive is easy, with a separate menu for recently opened files. Oddly, though, Word seemed unable to see some of the folders in our OneDrive Documents folder. We hope that’s a bug that’s rectified quickly.

Support for features such as Track Changes and commenting will be welcomed by those who spend their working lives labouring over document revisions. Simultaneous editing of documents remains clunky, though, with edits taking several seconds to appear, in contrast to the real-time editing available in Google Docs. We also find it a little strange that there’s absolutely no support for printing via Apple AirPrint.

Overall, Word is no better than Apple’s Pages for document creation, but if you’re an Office 365 subscriber with documents already stored in OneDrive, there’s no easier or cleaner way to work on an iPad.

Office for iPad: Excel

If you’ve ever tried to move a spreadsheet from Excel into Numbers, you’ll know that it isn’t exactly an elegant experience. Although formulae come across successfully, formatting rarely does. Excel for iPad, on the other hand, preserves almost everything, including conditional formatting, charts and even sparklines and comments – and you can make edits without stripping out features or ruining what’s already there.

When it comes to features, iPad for Excel is understandably less fully equipped than its desktop counterpart. Although it’s possible to read conditional formats, you can’t apply them; the same goes for sparklines, pivot tables, slicers. But the basics are covered: browsing and applying formulae works well, as does selecting and applying number formatting, creating charts, adding shapes, pictures and text boxes.

If you already use the application on the desktop, Excel is also a lot more familiar than Numbers, whose quirky approach to spreadsheets takes some getting used to. From the familiar green logo to the ribbon toolbar running across the top of the screen and positioning of worksheet tabs at the bottom, Excel for iPad is an easy transition.

That’s not to say Excel for iPad is without niggles. Navigating spreadsheets generally works well, but you can only zoom out to a certain degree, which makes it difficult to traverse extensive spreadsheets, and impossible to get a large-scale overview. It’s a pain to select large ranges, too: without being able to zoom back further, you have to drag a finger to the edge of the screen, then hold your finger there and wait while the spreadsheet scrolls – slowly – across the screen.

Indeed, the whole business of selecting, copying and pasting cells and formulae could be more elegant. There’s too much tapping and double-tapping for our liking, although there is plenty of power on offer once you get the hang of it. It’s possible to apply formula and number series fills and even paste formatting.

Overall, Excel for iPad is by no means the finished article, but thanks to its non-destructive support for most features of the desktop application it is a more useful business tool than Numbers.

Office for iPad review: PowerPoint

PowerPoint for iPad is the most impressive part of the new suite. From the moment you open it, it’s striking how much time and effort Microsoft has invested in creating an app you can actually enjoy working on. This is no cut-down substitute for the desktop software but a powerful app in its own right.

It helps that you get plenty of templates to choose from (there are 20 to be precise), and where PowerPoint for iPad really excels is in the quality of those templates. Whichever you pick, you can be confident the final version will be slick and professional, and you’ll get good results quickly. Each template includes several different slide types, such as titles, section headers, side-by-side comparisons and pictures with captions; only Apple’s Keynote can match it in this area.

The ribbon interface offers five tabs: Home, Insert, Transitions, Slide show and Review. PowerPoint aficionados will note the loss of animations, but there’s no shortage of transition effects. As ever, we’d suggest using these sparingly: the Airplane transition, where the screen reduces to the shape of a plane and flies away, is great the first time you see it; less so the second time.

The app opens in the Insert menu, letting you create new slides and insert tables, pictures, shapes and text boxes. Adding a table gives a good idea of the power on hand: a 3 x 3 box appears by default, but you can change its style to match the template or choose from any one of the other 73 styles on offer. You can also add shading, automatically scale the column width to fit its contents, align it to the left, centre, right… you get the idea.

The only disappointment is limited support for placing media. Only photos that are already on your iPad can be inserted, so you can’t use images from the internet or files in your OneDrive. Nor can you apply a crop: your only option is to add slightly cheesy effects such as picture frames and drop shadows. And there’s no way to add video at all.

One nice touch, though, is that you don’t need to close a presentation on the iPad if you want to quickly jump onto a PC to make a more sophisticated edit, or if someone else is making a change at the same time. A message pops up prompting you to save and refresh, and once you do any changes appear instantly.

Presentations created on the desktop look superb on the iPad, with all your existing formatting carried across. Because there’s “one version of the truth”, as Microsoft likes to say, there’s no destructive import or export process; if a feature isn’t supported, such as video, it simply won’t show on the iPad. And, although you can’t add animations, they will still play on PowerPoint for iPad.

When it’s time to show off your finished work on a projector, some final nice touches appear. Press on the screen for half a second and a laser pointer appears; moving to the next screen is a swipe away, and exiting the slide show is a simple pinch and zoom.

PowerPoint for iPad is a great app, and one you’ll want to download even if you haven’t signed up to Office 365. It’s a superb way to review and share presentations on the go – and if you do have an Office 365 subscription, it’s a handy and effective way to create and edit them too.

Office for iPad review: Dropbox and iCloud support

And the good news is that you don’t have to stick with OneDrive for sharing files if you don’t want to. Office for iPad also now supports opening and editing files from both the Dropbox and iCloud sync services.

To open or edit an Office file from Dropbox, you can either open the file in Dropbox then tap then Edit button to launch the relevant Office app, or you can simply access Dropbox files from within the apps – simply add Dropbox as a new “Place” and you’ll see it as an option next to.

iCloud support, however, is a little more restrictive. While it’s possible to open files from iCloud and save them back to the same location, you can’t yet open files from OneDrive or Dropbox and save those to iCloud, or add iCloud as a different “Place” within the Office for iPad apps.

Office for iPad review: Verdict

Office for iPad marks an impressive iOS debut for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Although some compromises are evident, we’re impressed at the apps’ ability to import and display desktop Office documents without ruining the formatting, and to edit those documents non-destructively. It’s a big step up from the workarounds we’ve previously had to put up with.

The big disappointment is that the apps aren’t available standalone, as other iOS-based office suites are. For those who already pay for Office 365, downloading and installing Office for iPad is a no-brainer, but ultimately the suite isn’t powerful enough to justify stumping up for a subscription on its own.