eInk screens have intrigued me ever since the original Kindle was released. I’ve always loved reading, and switched to eBooks years back simply to save the shipping costs I’d otherwise incur reading English books in Thailand. And yet, that very same issue—cost—kept me from getting a Kindle. Kindles are cheap, but cheap is still relative seeing as a Kindle would only be for reading and only every other device I could buy would be multipurpose (and that pesky little shipping cost issue was still there—after all, Apple devices cost almost the same around the world, but a Kindle costs almost double as much when you throw in international shipping and customs).
I’ve referred to my iPod Touch, and later iPhone, as my “Kindle” since I’ve always used them so much for reading, everything from news and Instapaper articles to dozens of full-length books. An iPhone is small enough to comfortably hold for long stretches, and can hold an ok amount of text on one screen (especially compared to my laughably small HTC Excalibur’s screen that I read full books on years ago). And, most importantly, the iPhone’s always with you, so you’ve got a library of books in your pocket at all times. That, to me, was even nicer than the iPod’s old promise of a thousand songs in your pocket.
And yet, the iPhone’s screen’s small enough to make reading annoying. You sure don’t want to read books on your laptop after spending a day working on it (and yet, I have done so many times over), and the iPad gets heavy after a while (and still feels the same as reading on a laptop screen).
So, I bought a Kindle Paperwhite, a 2nd generation ad-free one from a local reseller that threw in a case and charger for less than it’d cost from Amazon with international shipping. Interestingly, it came with 4Gb of storage, so presumably came from Amazon Japan where it’s shipped with 4Gb by default. Not that it matters much when you’re reading books—you can have hundreds of books and gigs of storage to spare. It was cheaper than an iPad Mini, or even a Nexus 7, though of course there’s plenty of cheap cut-rate Android tablets even cheaper than a Kindle today. But that wasn’t the real consideration. The real reason I wanted a real Kindle was for reading on a screen that felt more like paper and less like a screen.
Reading
And oh. Wow. eInk really does feel like reading on paper. The screen itself looks almost like slightly yellowed paper without the backlight, but turn up the Paperwhite’s backlight a bit and it’s almost the same as bright white paper under a light. Turn it down to the next-to-lowest setting, and it’s dim enough to read comfortably in the dark. Take it outside, and it’s clear as non-glossy paper in the sunlight. It’s the only screen I’ve ever used that looks better in sunlight.
If you’ve ever used any Kindle app, or honestly read on any touchscreen device, you’ll know how to use a Kindle automatically. Once you’ve signed into your Amazon account, your book library will be ready for you. Tap a book once to download it, then tap any book in your downloaded library to read it. The Kindle store works great on the Kindle—almost too good, if anything, since you can buy a book in literally one tap, no login required (that can be turned off if you want). There’s the famous “experimental browser” that’s worse than you could imagine, but then, it’s nice to have in a pinch (and allows Instapaper some neat Kindle integrations—more on that later).
The screen almost even feels like wax paper to touch. It’s the slightest bit rough, just enough to remind you you’re not swiping on a pane of glass anymore. You swipe or tap anywhere on the right 2/3rds of the screen to go to the next page, and tap the left 1/3 or so of the screen to go back. That’s enough difference to keep you from accidentally going back, while still making it easy enough to turn pages while holding the Kindle in one hand. And unlike the iPad, the Kindle Paperwhite feels just fine to hold one-handed for long stretches of reading.
I’d worried before buying a Kindle that the screen refresh—where the entire screen goes black before showing your page text periodically—would be annoying. And for the first few minutes of using it, my worst fears seemed true as it hard refreshed with every page swipe. After a bit, though, it settled down to the normal hard-refresh of once ever 10 page turns or so; it’ll refresh more when there’s graphics on a page, but otherwise, it ends up being unnoticeable.
The Kindle is an iPod for books, of sorts: it’s really a single purpose device just for reading. That’s all that matters; you could go for a week reading a book and never have to think about the tech aspects of the device. You turn it on, read, turn it off, then come back and jump back into the book directly. There’s no notifications, no games and YouTube videos and social networks to distract you. There’s just your reading. You can even tap in the lower left corner of the reading view, in the most recent update, and turn off the page number, position, and time left indicators to leave you alone with your text (that said, each of those are nice to have just one touch away). There’s font options (the default honestly looks better with most books, and I hope Amazon adds more typefaces in the future, but it’s ok as-is), search, table of contents, and more in the header if you top the top of the screen, but otherwise, all that fades away and leaves just your book.
It’s a smart book, though: you can tap-and-hold on a word to define it, use Kindle’s X-ray feature to see how often that word shows up in the book, or check Wikipedia about the term (and the Kindle smartly chooses the best pick of the three depending on what you select). Drag your finger over text, and you can highlight it, add a note (and easily copy them to your computer if you want), or share it on social networks. Uncannily enough, the text selection on the Kindle works better than it does in iOS, perhaps a testament to the benefits of a single-purpose device. Your page location, bookmarks, and highlights sync automatically just as they would in the Kindle app, so you can pick up reading in one of the Kindle apps if you want.
But you’re not going to worry about all that. You’re just going to read, because the Kindle makes reading as nice as on a book. No distractions, just a full page of text and the tiniest bit of smarts to make it feel perfect together.
And More
Now, there’s the whole thing of getting your reading material on the Kindle, but that’s nearly as simple as you could hope. Your Kindle library is always just a tap away, so anything you’ve ever bought there is easy to add to your offline library. Then, any DRM-free eBooks you own can be simply added to the Kindle by emailing them to your @kindle.com email address, as long as they’re in a compatible format (and you can convert other eBooks via the Kindle Previewer app on your Mac or PC). Next time you grab your Kindle, they’ll be ready for you to read.
There’s also periodicals on the Kindle, with a wide selection of both newspapers and magazines available for subscription. I got a New York Times trial subscription, since it’s the main news source I read online anyhow and the Kindle subscription lets you get unlimited access to their website and new NYTimes Now iPhone app as well. Every day (oddly enough, early evening my time in Bangkok since I subscribed to the American version, but that works out for me since I like reading in the evening) a set of today’s full-length articles will automatically show up on my Kindle, organized into sections and easy to browse. You can’t share posts directly to your social networks, but then, it’s more like a “real” paper. And that’s perfect. You can browse through articles quickly in a list view, jump to the next article with a tap on the bottom from any article, and search through a full “issue” or keep one day’s issue saved if you want to keep it around (otherwise it’ll be replaced with tomorrow’s issue).
And then there’s Instapaper, the killer app for Kindle. I’ve used it for years to save articles to read later, but it turns out, it’s best use is to save them and then let it send them to the Kindle automatically. You’ll then have a curated “newspaper” that works just like the New York Times or any other Kindle periodical, only one that’s filled with the stuff you picked, or you can send one-off articles directly to the Kindle using another Instapaper bookmarklet. Your Instapaper articles on Kindle even integrate with the Kindle’s browser with links at the end of articles to let you archive, archive and like, or delete them from your queue. That’s the perfect amount of tech to mix into your reading later list, and since reading on the Kindle is so nice, you’ll for once want to finish out your reading queue.
There’s one annoyance I’d love to get rid of: the row of suggested books on the home screen, even on the ad-free model. You can get rid of it by switching your books to list view, but I happen to like the cover view, and just don’t want the suggested books there. Show that in the store, perhaps, but let me see more of my own books when I’m on the home screen.
Update: Thanks to @maique, I've discovered that you can turn off the suggested books on the home screen. It's just a bit hidden. To find the elusive setting, open Settings, select Device Options, then tap Personalize your Kindle, and finally slide off the Recommended Content button. Then return to your home screen, and bask in the presence of 6 of your most recent books and periodicals, with no recommended books in sight.
Other than that, I cannot think of one thing I’d change about the Kindle Paperwhite. It’s that nice.
If you love reading, you should get one already. It’s absolutely a nicer reading experience than you’ll ever get on another traditional tablet, cheap enough to justify just for reading, and simple enough that you won’t end up feeling the urge to upgrade it semiannually along with your smartphone. It’s just a smarter book, and that’s quite enough for quite some time to come.
There’s one tiny thing that’s always bugged me: not being able to install my own fonts in iOS. I wouldn’t want to change the main system fonts, but simply would like to bring, oh, Maven Pro or Courier Prime or Pitch to the iPad and use it as a writing font in text editors and word processors. The built in typefaces are great, far better than the terribly limited selection included on other mobile OSes, but there’s a world of beautiful typography that’s off limits to the iPad unless a developer adds them directly to that app.
Letting you install your own typefaces doesn’t seem like too crazy of a request; after all, if the iPad’s the computer of the future, the designers of the future will want to work with more than just Helvetica Neue and Zapfino. Plus, iOS doesn’t support every language out-of-the-box, and many languages only have one supported font in iOS, so for those languages installing extra fonts is actually even more important.
Several months ago, I discovered that you can install OS X dictionaries in iOS 7. That was pretty awesome to find, since I often consult a Thai-to-English dictionary and now that’s just a tap away from any word on my iPhone.
That discovery led me to find that you could also install your own fonts on iOS—though at the time it was required a rather convoluted process. Abelardo Gonzalez, the design of the OpenDyslexic typeface, first cued me in that you could do so, as him and others had pieced together how to get it to work thanks to iOS 7’s Configuration Profiles. Since then, support’s shown up in a number of places, and now it’s terribly easy to get your own fonts installed on your iPhone or iPad. Here’s the best ways:
AnyFont, a new $1.99 app from the App Store, makes it one-tap simple to install any font you want on your device. This is absolutely the easiest way.
If you’ve purchased a typeface from MyFonts, you can now install it on iOS directly from their site.
If you want to add extra languages to your iOS device, Keyman is a $2.99 app that already includes fonts for the most common languages that aren’t supported out-of-the-box in iOS and lets you install them in a tap, then use them in custom keyboards inside the app.
Now, all you’ll have to do is open an app that lets you choose your editing font (yup, Pages works fine) and select your newly installed font from the font list. It’ll work for normal editing, and even should print out perfectly in completed documents. And if you’ve installed a font that supports a non-supported language in iOS, you’ll suddenly be able to read text in that language in every app on your device.
iOS is slowly but surely growing into a full computing platform that’s increasingly close to letting you do anything you’d do on a Mac or PC. The past month has brought us both Microsoft Office and Adobe Lightroom for the iPad, filling out the ranks of professional apps that already were on the iPad, from Apple’s iWork and iLife apps to great productivity apps from Panic, the Omni Group, and so many more 3rd party developers. Throw in Mac-like features like being able to install your own dictionaries and fonts, and some hardware like an external keyboard and wireless printer, and there’s little that the iPad can’t do these days.
It’s indisputable today that the iPad’s as much a work device as anything. It’s a real computer—one that even lets you bring along your own typefaces. Now, if we just had Xcode for iPad and could code iPad apps on the iPad, it’d be a 100% complete standalone computing platform.
Microsoft Office's branding today is more centered on colors and typography than the icons themselves. If you find yourself wanting to use their icons in your own work, say perhaps in a preview image when writing about them (the reason I needed them), it's easiest to have a palette of the colors used for Office's branding. And thanks to the CSS on Office.com, here's the official colors for each of the major Office apps:
Word: #2b579a
Excel: #217346
PowerPoint: #d24726
OneNote: #80397b
Outlook: #0072c6
OneDrive: #094ab2
And, of course, each of the app names are set in Microsoft's Segoe UI Light typeface.
PDFs can be rather annoying to edit if you want to more than mockup and move pages around (something you can do rather easily in OS X' Preview app and a number of alternate PDF readers). If you have a copy of Adobe Acrobat, it's easy enough to edit them, but that requires Creative Cloud ($50/month) or a $400 investment.
So here, in my latest Tuts+ tutorial, is how to use Word 2013 to edit PDFs—and how to use Nitro Cloud to get PDFs ready for editing in any other version of Word. It's not something you'll need to use every day—if you do, just get a copy of Acrobat already—but might be a nice tip to bookmark for the times you do need to edit a PDF.
TL;DR: Social networks are great for spreading the word about almost anything. Ads on them, not so much.
I had a Doxie One to giveaway, and picked to give it away on April 1st as a inverse joke of sorts. This one’s the joke that’s actually real, everyone! Not exactly the best idea ever, since everyone seemed to ignore the giveaway the first day it was online, assuming it was just another April Fools’ joke, only one a lot less funny than the rest.
Yet, it was no joke. I had a real, $149 scanner courtesy of the Doxie team to giveaway, and I wanted to spread the word far and wide. What better place to spread the word about anything than social networks? The entries were trickling in from my existing follower base and their friends as the message shared, but I wanted more.
And so, I decided to do a little experiment. Every time you post something on a Facebook Fan Page these days, it prompts you to promote the post for money. I decided to take them up on it, for once. I’d promote the post to an audience of people who should be interested in a Doxie One (people who liked Evernote, Microsoft Office, and a few other things) in English speaking countries (since my post was in English), and limit the budget to the minimum possible ($15). The post told people that I was giving away a Doxie One, and to like the page and comment on that post to enter the giveaway. That’s not too much work to have a shot at a $149 scanner, and I figured I’d at least grow my page’s fan count, regardless of how unimportant that is with the new Facebook feed.
I did almost the same thing on Twitter, targeting people who were interested in Technology and liked Evernote, Doxie, and OneNote. You have to set a bid cost for clicks on Twitter as well; I’m cheap, so I went for half of the $1.15 they’d suggested. And I gave the campaign the same budget as Facebook’s, this time telling people to follow my page and share the post to enter.
You’d figure you’d get at least something for $30 of ads on the two hottest properties online today.
Not so fast.
Twitter says I got 5 new followers and Facebook claims 10 new likes on my page thanks to ads. And yet, my Facebook page likes actually only went up by 7, and my new Twitter followers are all people who already followed my personal Twitter account. Twitter says I got a total of 319 clicks to my site link thanks to the ad, and Facebook got 159 people to like my post and 6 people to click through to my site.
And yet, of all those, not one actually did what I said to enter the giveaway. No one commented on the Facebook posts, and the only people who shared the Twitter post were ones who would have seen it through my other account already. I got a ton of likes on the Facebook post itself, but that’s worth zero—page likes were what I was after, along with spreading the word about the giveaway, but apparently people clicked like on a picture post without even reading what it said.
Perhaps my targeting was too broad; I just saw a post today talking about how well Facebook mobile ads had worked for marketing an app with very specific targeting. I was trying to get a broad spectrum of viewers, and yet, perhaps that broad spectrum was less specifically interested in what I was offering.
Ads are a tough thing to actually get to work out well. If you’re Coke, you’re just trying to keep your brand’s name in people’s minds. With that, almost every possible ad buy is justifiable. But if you’ve got a specific goal in mind with your ad—getting people to share your content or directly purchase your product—Facebook and Twitter’s “targeting” isn’t going to magically bring the right people to your doorstep.
You might get a lot of likes on a post. But that’s not worth anything. You’re far better off focusing on your existing followers, and growing them naturally through quality products and posts. Even if you’re giving something away, the vast majority of people simply won’t notice if you’re telling them in an ad.
If you already owned Office 2011 for Mac or individual copies of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint for Mac, and also have an Office 365 subscription (perhaps so you could use Office for iPad), you can actually go ahead and switch your currently installed copy of Office for Mac to Office 365 if you want. That way, you can get all of the Office apps and features—Outlook, say, if you had the Home edition, or all the other apps if you only owned one of them—on your Mac. Plus, you could free up that original license to perhaps install on an older Mac you've handed down.
Here's what you need to do. Just make sure you've installed the latest updates, then open any of the Office apps you have installed, click their app name in the menu, and select *Upgrade Office...
Then, in the Getting Started dialog that'll open, select Sign in to an existing Office 365 subscription. Sign in with your Microsoft account, and seconds later your license will be switched to an Office 365 account. Interestingly enough, the Product ID will be "11111-111-1111111-11111" after you switch to an Office 365 license, instead of the typically random number you'll see after activating with a traditional license.
You'll now have access to every app included with Office 2011. There's no extra features right now, and the online sharing still says that you'll share documents to SkyDrive instead of the newer OneDrive, but at least you'll have everything on one license. And, of course, if you're making documents on your iPad, you'll want to have OneDrive for Mac installed to keep everything in sync.
Now, Microsoft will surely ship a new version of Office for Mac this year, hopefully with an overhauled UI like we've seen in OneNote for Mac, and with some of Office 2013's features like the new Flash Fill in Excel. It's hard to say how Office 2014 will ship for the Mac, but it's certain to be tied to Office 365 subscriptions and having yours on your Mac now can only make the transition easier.
The best thing about Evernote is the Evernote Web Clipper. You select the parts of a page you want to save, or extract just a simplified copy of the text on the page, then add your own note and tags and save it to Evernote. Whenever you need to find something, you'll likely have it right there in your notes database instead of having to trek back to the site. It works great, and I've used it instead of traditional bookmarking for months now.
Only problem is, there's no Web Clipper for iOS. I've taken to leaving tabs open in Safari on my iPhone, then opening them on the Mac via iCloud Tabs and saving them to Evernote there. That's annoying at best, though, and I needed a better solution. Leave it to my friend Phillip Gruneich, who's made the x-callback-library and always comes up with clever iOS automation tricks, to hack together a bookmarklet to save sites to Evernote on iOS via Drafts. And it works great.
If you've ever wanted the Evernote web clipper for iOS, for now, this is your best solution. Enjoy!
The new Microsoft Office apps for iPad are surprisingly nice and full-featured, but there’s one very major feature they’re missing: the ability to print. It’s easy to print from your iPad if you have an AirPrint-equipped Wifi printer, which includes most mid-priced printers sold in the past few years. Most productivity apps like the iWork suite include printing—but in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for iPad, there’s no print button to be found. That’s a problem, especially for Word, if you’re using Office for iPad for real work and don’t have another Mac or PC to print from.
And yet, it’s not a problem at all—it’ll just take a couple extra steps. Here’s how you can print from any of the Office for iPad apps today, and as a bonus, how to export your Office documents in PDF format from your iPad or Office.com.
Just make your documents in Office on your iPad as normal, and save them to OneDrive. That’s the default place to save documents in the Office apps on iPad, and it’ll let you open them in the Office.com web apps. That’s important, because it has printing and a hidden PDF export tool, where the iPad apps don’t offer either for now.
Once you’re done, open Safari on your iPad, go to Office.com, select the app you were just editing the document in on your iPad, then choose the Recent documents on OneDrive button and select your file from the list (it should be the document on the top). Now, just tap the Print button in the top ribbon of the document preview view. Alternately, if you open the document for editing in the Office web app, tap the File tab in the ribbon, then select the Print tab and click the Print button. Either which of those will open a small popover that’ll let you know it’s getting your document ready to print, and then will say Click here to view the PDF of your document.
Click that link, and then you’ve got two options. If you wanted to print the PDF, just tap the share button in the top of Safari, select Print, and follow the directions to print as normal. Your document should look the exact same as it did in Word thanks to the fact that PDFs preserve all of your formatting and look the same everywhere. Then, if you actually wanted a PDF of your document in the first place, you can save it to your iPad or share it directly in any of your apps, just like you would with any other PDF.
I’d assume Microsoft will add printing support to the Office for iPad apps soon, but for now, that should be enough for you to get your documents printed from your iPad without needing a Mac or PC. And that’s pretty nice.
It’s a terrible day. Everyone’s making up fake news and bogus products, just to trick you, all because it’s the first day of April. You don’t know what’s true and what’s not, and are having to take the internet with a grain of salt instead of just blindly trusting it like usual.
And that’s sad. There’s no reason why April 1st can’t be another great day, a magical day even. The day all your dreams come true, or at least some of them, for real.
And so, thanks to the Doxie team, I’ve got a Doxie One to giveaway this April Fool’s day. The Doxie One is the new scanner you’ve heard so much about. You just turn it on, feed your documents into it, and it’ll save them as high-quality scans on an SD card. Scan every document you get, then just forget about it—you can quickly sync them to your Mac or PC any time (and send your scans to Evernote or OneNote directly), without having to worry about file names and other silliness every time you need to scan.
You know how you’ve taken so many more pictures ever since you got a smartphone? That’s what the Doxie will do to scanning. It makes it so easy, you’ll want to scan everything.
This April Fools’, you’ve got a chance to get a Doxie One for free. Here’s what you’ve got to do to get an entry in the giveaway:
Tweet about the giveaway, and include a link to this post and mention both Twitter accounts. Be creative, and say something funny—that may or may not help your chances.
Optionally for an extra chance to enter, signup for the Techinch Newsletter. It’s new, it’s exciting, and it’s your chance to get an extra shot at this beautiful new Doxie One.
Really, this isn’t a joke. So get your Tweet sent out, and subscribe to the newsletter, and this just might be the first April Fools’ day where the joke’s not on you.
Happy April Gifts day!
Contest open worldwide, and will end midnight GMT on Friday, April 4th, 2014.
Hell has indeed frozen over. Microsoft has finally made Office for iPad—the device that in one sheet of aluminum and glass sums up all of their fears about the future of computing. Until now, they’ve faced the challenge by pretending there was no competition. There’s iPads for fun, right along with iPods and Xboxes and everything else (well, maybe not the Xbox. It’s only for serious fun. But I digress), and then there’s PCs for Real Work™. That’s the thing Redmond is good at: work.
And yet, we’ve all worked on our iPads for the past 4 years just fine. Ok, maybe not just fine, but it’s been pretty swell. We've learned to work in new ways, found that lighter apps had enough power for most of our daily tasks, and learned that Office alternatives can actually be pretty nice. Perhaps it's taken a bit of adjustment, but the world has moved on from the productivity solutions we've relied on for the past two decades. The change has been nice, even. The troubles we’ve had in working on the iPad have been with multitasking and sharing files and such, not with Office. iWork has been fine for that, for the most part, and it even plays nicely with our Microsoft Office files. All’s fine in the world of work.
But it’s not fine for Redmond, because we’re not using Office. We’re working, but Office is an afterthought. And that’s a huge problem for a company where Office represents over 50% of their profits. The world leaving Windows behind is worrisome enough, but if they leave Office behind as well, Microsoft is dead.
*****
It's surprising today that Microsoft made Office for iPad. Yet, if anything, it should be most surprising that they only just made Office for iPad. The original Microsoft Office ran on the original Macintosh, long before there was a graphical version of Windows, much less Office for Windows. Sure, the Mac version of Office has always lagged behind its Windows counterpart, but it existed at least. It kept people using Office no matter which platform they were using. Even the online challenge of Google Docs was met with light versions of Office Web Apps, though they were hidden in SkyDrive and only recently rebranded as Office Online.
Yet, the iPad seemed too direct a challenge to Microsoft’s own platforms. Redmond had dismissed first the iPhone, and now its tablet counterpart was only deemed worthy of derision as a toy, even as the company worked feverishly to build touch versions of Windows. Making Office for iPad would grant it recognition in the business world as a real work device, and by extension make the Post PC world seem all the more real.
No one ever got fired for buying IBM, or so the saying goes in the IT world, and Microsoft nearly earned the same level of respect in business. The iPad and iPhone changed that. No one asked if they could roll out iOS devices—employees just started using them in real work, and they worked. Worked great. Worked so well, companies started rolling them out internally. Microsoft’s largest clients weren't asking if Office would run on the iPad, they just found the stuff that did work on the iPad, and ran with it.
At the same time, Microsoft was so intent on keeping the PC king, it didn’t even make touch-first copies of Office for its own touch-first OS, Windows 8. When Microsoft’s own apps didn't run in the new Modern UI on Windows 8, it's no surprise at all that 3rd party developers largely ignored it as well. Their stubbornness with Office and obsession with fighting the iPad without recognizing it as an equal competitor was killing it from all sides. Windows Phone didn't fare any better. Its bundled copy of Office Mobile includes so few features, its best use is as a marketing statement that screams “See, you need a PC to do real work.” Office was the one selling point Microsoft has consistently used to show that Windows devices are better, and yet they were the weakest point on their modern, touch devices.
In the meantime, the rest of the world was getting used to using the rather polished iWork apps even with their more limited features, and finding that Google Docs actually worked for their desktop office needs—or that their office needs weren't quite as complex as they'd originally thought. The lack of Office everywhere gave everyone a chance to sit back and reconsider if they really had to have Office or not. The answer came back as no far more often than Microsoft had ever dared to fear.
Had they continued their original mantra to have Office everywhere, most would have simply continued using it without considering the alternatives. Now, it'll take a lot to win everyone back. There's no option to simply make a light version of Office for iPad and call it a day—it has to be better than iWork, Google Docs, and everything else we’ve replaced Office with, or it'll get lost in the App Store along with countless other word processors and more.
Microsoft doesn't win today by sheer power of their name. They've got to compete with everyone else on equal footing. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on iPad have to stand on their own merits.
*****
Word is the word processor of record, the app where everything from highschool essays to book drafts are expected to be created. Excel is the spreadsheet app that, for better or worse, defines spreadsheets. And PowerPoint is the presentations app who's very name is used as a generic word for presentations. To stand on their own, these apps each have to at least enough better than the existing alternatives to reclaim the name as the de facto standard apps for each of these categories on the iPad.
And, of all surprising things, they do. Word for iPad opened a 350 page book draft PDF in under half a minute, complete with sidebars, images, multi-column text on some sections, footers, and more. Scrolling through the document was silky-smooth, and searching for text was nearly as quick as you'd expect on a computer. Pages, with the same document on the same iPad 4, took several minutes attempting to open it before crashing. On a second attempt, it opened it, but with formatting errors and terribly slow scrolling.
That’s an extreme example, of course. Most of the documents most of us use on a daily basis aren't that long. But Word for iPad—despite its more limited feature set than Word on a Mac or PC—still includes tools to easily change your page size and margins, more advanced numbering and outline tools, multi-column and text box support, along with text wrapping around images and more. The ribbon is there, making it familiar, and yet it's slimmed down to fit nicely on the iPad's screen. There's even sharing and live co-editing tools to work on documents with others. Word for iPad is almost surprisingly polished; it's as smooth and slick as any other top-notch indie app on the iPad. It's every bit as nice as Pages for iPad, and then some—along with, apparently, a lot more power.
The same trend continues with Excel for iPad, which is more limited than Excel on a Mac or PC but far more powerful than Numbers for iPad. You can reference data in other sheets easily, add charts (even sparklines) in a tap, and enter data fast with a specialized numpad keyboard. You'll miss features like PivotTables from the PC, but then, you can at least view PivotTables in Excel for iPad and edit the underlying data, even if you can't create them yourself on the iPad just yet.
Keynote, iWork's counterpart to PowerPoint, has always been the more polished of the two, at least if you want slick animations. And yet, surprise of all surprises, PowerPoint for iPad packs in enough snazzy slide transitions that playback silky-smooth to make Keynote devotees pause. It's the weakest of the Office for iPad apps, in my opinion, with too few features to even cover all of Keynote's features (there's no object animation, for one), but it's at least not just a weak attempt to bring basic slideshow to the iPad. It's an actually useful presentations app that could be 100% useful on its own.
Perhaps that's the best thing of the full iPad Office suite. These aren't light apps that feel like they're only meant as companions to the PC suite. Just like iWork, they feel like they've been designed to be used productively 100% on their own—and at the same time, they're equally useful in tandem with their Mac, PC, and web app counterparts. In an even nicer extra that's a surprise bonus of being tied to Office 365 accounts, you can sign out of the Office apps and let others sign into their own accounts—the best option for sharing an iPad with someone else for productivity apps I've seen yet outside of Dropbox syncing (and that'd be a terrible pain to sign in and out of in every app).
*****
But then, there's the pricing. Office Online is perhaps the best deal Microsoft's ever offered: it's 100% free. Microsoft's Office apps for phones (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone) are all free, but they're also all terrible—seriously, even on Windows Phone, you can do more in WordPad on a PC than you can in Word on mobile. Then, on Macs and PCs, Office typically comes in a suite that retails for around $150+, depending on which apps you need. Or, more recently, you can subscribe to the whole suite via Office 365 for ~$9/month.
Full powered apps, full price. Lite apps, free.
Office for iPad decidedly falls on the former side of that equation—and thankfully so. As such, it costs, and the only way to buy it is with an Office 365 subscription. The apps themselves are free and individual in the App Store; you can download just Word, or just Excel, or all the apsp if you want. But just with that download, all you can do is view your files. To unlock editing, you'll need an Office 365 subscription, one you already have or one you purchase in the apps via a $99/year in-app purchase.
That essentially means Office for iPad costs $99/year, and that's getting a lot of attention. But then, that $99/year also lets you run Office on up to 5 Macs and PCs (and you can even share that subscription with others in your household or, ahem, quite possibly with friends), and gives you extra free OneDrive storage and 60 minutes/month of Skype calling. That's not so bad. And at any rate, if you actually need to use Office apps for work, paying a couple dollars more than a Netflix subscription isn't worth worrying about.
That is, unless you don't need Office. And here's the real dilemma: you can use Office Online—real Microsoft Office, albeit with fewer features than the iPad apps offer—for free in Safari on your iPad, and it actually works very well with touch. Or, you can use Apple's iWork, which again is polished and nice, with nearly as many features as Office for iPad—and it's free with a new iPad as well. There's Google Docs as well, though it has enough issues on mobile to not make it a solid contender here with those other great free choices.
Therein is Microsoft's challenge: making Office not just good, but great. So great, in fact, that we will want to use it, enough that it'll give us $9 worth of value in our work and lives each month beyond what we already get for free. Today's Office for iPad is good enough to directly take on the existing free alternates on the iPad, and then some. That's exciting enough. After Microsoft's feeble attempts to bring Office to phones, I'd all but written off Office for iPad long before it was released. No other 3rd party developer has even begun to compete directly with iWork for iPad, and I really didn't think Microsoft could pull that off either. And yet they did.
Now the challenge remains to fill out these apps feature-set and make them 100% competitive with Office on the Mac and PC. That would turn heads. We already have great Office apps that have basic features and are slick, and Office has amply taken those on. The interesting part of the challenge is the rest of the journey.
Will Microsoft have the courage to let Office for iPad compete directly with Office for PC? My $99 this year is betting they will.
