The Office team's on a roll. After releasing the redesigned free Office.com web apps and finally shipping Office for iPad—as a much more full-featured suite than most of us would have expected—it looks like it's going to be a good year for the 2nd most important team in Redmond (presumably Windows is still considered more important for the company). And so, yesterday, the Office Team ran an IAmA Q&A session on Reddit yesterday as, perhaps, a bit of publicity for the new apps and a chance to answer a few questions from users.
There were a few interesting facts revealed by the Office for iPad team—which, incidentally, is the Office for Mac team as well. When asked why the apps shipped without print support, they said “Print is a high demand feature that we intend to introduce in due course,” and also indicated that since Office is a subscription service, they'll be shipping updates and new features far quicker than in the past. Promising, at least. Though, all features won't ever make their way over; macros, especially, aren't expected to be added to Office for iPad barring an App Store policy change.
Building Office for iPad was, as should be assumed, not something that just started recently. "The decision to ship Office for iPad was made before Satya became CEO. Steve Ballmer approved the plan to ship Office for iPad." It took such a long time because they wanted to get it right, delivering an Office experience that felt familiar to existing Office users but was also perfect on touch. “Since we were designing Office for iPad from a “blank slate” so to speak, we wanted to take the time to deliver the highest possible quality Office experience that is fully optimized for the iPad. A wise man once said, “Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.” That rings true for how we thought about it” said Kaberi, Technical Product Manager of Office for iPad.
It's impossible to say if they could have shipped Office for iPad sooner—I'd like to think they absolutely could have if they'd wanted to—but what really matters is that it's here, it's polished, and is something plenty of people will want to use. They're so serious about getting it working good, they have an entirelab of iPads to test it in every possible scenario. It's even built using native Objective C code for its UI, with the core engine behind the apps being the same C++ core that powers ever edition of Office. It's the real deal.
The question still remains if enough people will want to pay for Office 365 to use it, but there seems to be enough who do to have Word and Excel rather high on the top grossing list of the App Store. There were plenty of people asking if the Office apps will be available for direct purchase without a subscription on the iPad, but that was never answered—presumably, of course, the only option Microsoft will ever offer is the subscription.
Then, there's the future. In addition to the promise of print support coming to Office for iPad, the team confirmed that “Yes, we are working on the next version of Office for the Mac.” They also said that the work on Office for iPad will help with shipping the next version of Office for Mac. “The code for Office for iPad and Office for Mac is shared, as the development platforms for both are very similar. :) The iPad work required us to create an all-new UI and to redesign the interface between UI and the internal logic. That work actually helps us with de-Carbonizing Office for the Mac, instead of delaying or hindering it. We're able to create new Cocoa UI on the Mac and tie it into the new logic interface now.” That work will now help with shipping the next Office for Mac, and the touch interface research will presumably help as they make Office for the Windows Store and even Android tablets, both of which were promised during the IAmA (though at the same time, the idea of Office for Linux was shot down).
And yet, the most interesting part of the interview was the banner over Microsoft's Silicon Valley headquarters that the Office for iPad team shared (pictured above). "The most anticipated Office. Ever." That doesn't read like words from a team who begrudgingly released the minimum of Office compatibility for the iPad possible, just to keep competition at bay. It reads like a team that's truly proud of their work, of one who really does want the best of Office on the most popular platforms, whether or not they're Microsoft's.
“We want to bring great Office experience to our customers who want to be productive on their tablets," said Sangeeta Mudnal, Excel's Group Program Manager. That's the spirit needed if Microsoft wants to compete: making productivity tools we'll all want to use on any device. If they keep improving Office for iPad and adding more feature, there's a solid chance for that. There's still the fear that Microsoft will treat the iPad as a second-class citizen going forward, and give the best of Office to their own Windows 8.1 tablets—and yet, that banner above makes me think that's not what Microsoft's thinking.
They're proud to have Office on iPad. That's a very good thing.
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.
