Hi All!

[JROW]

I am a business professional lucky enough to be the guinea pig for our first Apple product. I hope this site will be helpful to get information, especially concerning business apps (I will of course be using the iPad for pleasure as well).

 

[SweetPoison]

Welcome, from Cali!! Glad you found us. Don't be a stranger!

 

[richsadams]

iPad Office Apps Review

Here's a copy of a post I made on another website answering a member's questions about what business apps work best on the iPad...

For those who use Pages on the iPad, is there a way to save in a Microsoft Word format directly from the iPad? I know the desktop version supports this, but wasn't sure about on the iPad. If not, are there any iPad applications that can create and edit Word docs?

The same question holds for Numbers and Keynote as well with regards to their MS equivalent.

Funny you should ask. I did some research for my company before we issued iPads to the field teams recently. Like most companies our business uses MS Office primarily and I had to determine the best software for the iPad to be able to read and save Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files. For day-to-day use Pages, Numbers, Keynote and GoodReader were fine. However when it came to editing and saving documents in Word and especially Excel, Pages and Numbers weren't up to the task.

So I downloaded and tried some other office apps. Besides Apple’s iWork Suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) these were the highest rated:

- Office2 HD ($7.99)
- Documents to Go ($9.99)
- QuickOffice ($14.99)

I was able to open and manipulate several basic spreadsheets, Word documents, PDF’s, etc. without any issues in all three programs as well as Apple’s apps.

However when I began throwing some heavy duty spreadsheets at them there were issues. Depending on the size of the file, some programs opened them faster than others, but due to size it did take a little time for the largest files (about 6MB) to open. Some programs including Numbers and Documents to Go would not open the larger Excel files at all due to size. Others had trouble with formatting, sheet protection or unsupported formulas however they would open as “read onlyâ€.

Office2 HD was the only program that would allow me to open all of the files, make changes and save them. I was able to export them to my company computer, however upon import some non-destructive formatting changes were made and although the figures were fine, they lost some color coding, etc. The more basic files I opened and saved in Numbers, QuickOffice and Documents to go exported with the formatting intact.

Even though everything in the iPad is solid state/Flash memory which makes it very snappy, the somewhat low RAM causes a bottleneck when opening and saving such large files. (Since the iPad 2 has a little more horsepower it should do better in this area) but we need to keep in mind that the iPad isn’t a replacement for a computer or even a full-fledged laptop.

At this point all I can say is that all of the programs work well with Word and PowerPoint files as well as “average†Excel spreadsheets, but may not with larger, more complicated spreadsheets. One work around if you just need to share a complicated spreadsheet would be to create a PDF.

After using all of these apps for a while I still use GoodReader, Pages and Numbers for day-to-day work. For more detailed work I'd probably go with Documents To Go. The other two are fine but DTG has the most intuitive and elegant UI IMHO. If I had to deal with large spreadsheets it would be Office2 HD, but it's very kludgy compared to DTG. I don't think you'd go wrong with any of the three though.

Hope that helps!

 

[Tim SPRACKLEN]

That's an excellent summary - many thanks. I've bookmarked this post; we often get enquiries about the various iPad 'Office' compatible apps and this is a very objective review, which would be very helpful to point other members to. thank you for taking the time and trouble.

Tim
Scotland

 

[richsadams]

Glad to be of service any time!

 

[marspars]

docs 2 go

@richsadams-- which version of docs to go is your go-to? (office, premium, etc.?) Also, has anyone tried using word or excel via iTeleport connection to their home computer? Does it work?

 

[richsadams]

@richsadams-- which version of docs to go is your go-to? (office, premium, etc.?)

Welcome to the forum. I've just used the basic Documents to Go Office Suite.

 

[Ncaissie]

@Rich

Thanks for the review. I have one more question.
I have poor spelling and rely heavily on spell-check. The iOS spell-check is not that great. Does any of those tools have a good spell checker?

 

[Sopranosv]

Amazing information...thanks a lot...

 

[chadmart]

Do any of the non-iWorks apps read files from iWorks? I ask because we have iWorks on my wife's iMac and I have a PC with Office. I would rather have a program that deals with office files better, but it still has to read the iWorks files as well.

 

[Tim SPRACKLEN]

iWorks apps can save and open files in both .doc and pages format. So you could save iWorks files in Office format and then edit them on any of the apps that support Office documents - using the Apple app Pages you could then save them in Pages format again.

Tim

 

[richsadams]

@Rich

Thanks for the review. I have one more question.
I have poor spelling and rely heavily on spell-check. The iOS spell-check is not that great. Does any of those tools have a good spell checker?

I don't know that they have anything built in. I just get the underlined word "warning" if I make a spelling mistake as well as a suggested spelling/word as I type.

 

[Ncaissie]

Thanks

 

[No1zeppelinfan]

In many threads it mentions Office2HD but on my itunes all I can find (and bought) was Office HD. It that the same or does the USA have Office2HD and the UK doesn't?

 

[Tim SPRACKLEN]

I can see Office2HD in the UK App Store. Not sure what the issue is...

Tim