Office for ipad
Word, Excel & Keynote reviewed
If you’re an Office subscriber, these apps offer the best fidelity for reading Office documents
Free (viewing documents only); £80 per year subscription for editing Developer Microsoft, office.microsoft.com
Works with iPad Version 1.0 Age 4+
It’s taken Microsoft four years to embrace the iPad. However, there’s no doubt it’s now doing so wholeheartedly. Word for iPad is not only an excellent word processor, but it’s better designed than the equivalent on Microsoft’s own Surface tablet.
Word for iPad uses the same ‘ribbon’ bar at the top of the screen as desktop Office, but everything is optimised for touch. The feature set is more comprehensive than the version of Office released last year for iPhone: styles are supported (although you can’t create new ones on iPad) along with tables, hyperlinks, footnotes and much more. The missing feature is the ability to print.
Documents created on the desktop display faithfully on the iPad. However, fonts can be a problem – if the iPad doesn’t have an equivalent to the desktop font, it chooses an alternative. But, as long as you don't change the font on the iPad, it retains the original choice when you open the document on desktop.
Word can store documents locally on the iPad, but the main way you’re likely to use it is with Microsoft’s OneDrive online storage. OneDrive has a sync client available for the Mac, which works in a similar way to Dropbox, so anything you save on your iPad is replicated over to your Mac. It’s not as elegant or invisible to the user as iCloud, but it still works acceptably well.
OneDrive includes collaborative features, which let you share a link to a file and allow people to edit it at the same time as you. However, if you are collaboratively editing a file, automatic save is disabled – something that will make those who have lost files to Word crashing on the desktop a little nervous.
Word’s offline capabilities are a bit hit and miss. You can create new documents when you don't have an internet connection, but you can only save them locally. There’s no option to save them to OneDrive for automatically uploading later. If you’ve ‘Pinned’ an existing document manually, you should be able to edit it offline , with changes sent to OneDrive later.
In use, we found it to be a little buggy, with occasional crashes when opening documents, and the app is sometimes slow to open.
Is it worth getting an Office 365 subscription just to use Word for iPad? Probably not – iWork is a better option thanks to its low price. The exceptions are if you need to view and edit Word documents with as close to perfect fidelity as possible, or if you’re a Windows user and so don’t have the option of using iCloud and iWork on your desktop.
If you’re already an Office 365 subscriber download all the Office apps – even if you never use them to author documents – they offer the best fidelity for reading Office documents you’ll find. Ian Betteridge