About farking time….
OTB
Microsoft Office for iPad sets the gold standard for tablet productivity
By Ed Bott for The Ed Bott Report | March 27, 2014
Microsoft today released native iPad apps for its flagship Office programs—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The three new apps join the existing iOS apps from the Office family: OneNote, Lync, OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, and an OWA app for Exchange-based email.
After four years’ worth of speculation and anticipation, today’s releases are a welcome arrival for longtime Office users who’ve had to deal with incompatibilities and unsatisfying alternatives every time they picked up an iPad.
Make no mistake about it: These three apps are feature-rich, powerful tools for creating and editing Office documents. They look and act like their Office 2013 counterparts on Windows. And although these iPad apps obviously can’t replicate every feature of the full desktop programs, they deliver an impressive subset of those features. Anyone who was expecting Office Lite or a rehash of the underwhelming Office for iPhone will be pleasantly surprised.
Technically, there’s no such thing as Office for iPad. Each of the apps is a separate download from the App Store. They’re all designed for use on iPads running iOS 7 or later. (That restriction leaves out the original iPad owners, which won’t run iOS 7.)
As I predicted a year ago, the apps themselves are free, but you’ll need an Office 365 subscription (Home, Personal, Small Business, or Enterprise) to unlock their full potential. Unless you activate the app by signing in with your Office 365 credentials, you’ll be limited to reading Word documents, working with Excel data, and presenting PowerPoint slide shows. Only Office 365 subscribers get to create new documents or use any of the rich editing tools.
You can create and save files directly on an iPad, but these apps are expressly designed for cloud storage, using Microsoft’s OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint.
The apps themselves are fast and extremely responsive. They also walk the delicate tightrope between observing iPad interface conventions and building on the muscle memory of anyone who’s used the desktop apps included with an Office 365 subscription.
Tap the button in the upper left corner, for example, just as in Office 2013 apps, to display a File menu that lets you create a new document, reopen a recently used file, or browse through local and cloud storage to find a specific file. (Using the OneDrive for Business app, you can mark files or folders to be cached for offline use.
Commands for each app are grouped on ribbons that are more compact than their desktop alternatives. (To save space, you can tap the commands on the ribbon to hide the options for that tab, then tap again to make them visible again.) The number of options available on each ribbon is, likewise, limited in comparison to the full desktop programs.
CNET Video: Microsoft Office for iPad in action
What’s most impressive about these apps is how faithfully they display Office documents. Virtually all of the Word documents, Excel workbooks, and PowerPoint presentations I opened displayed perfectly on the iPad’s screen. The only exceptions involved documents with fonts that weren’t available on the iPad and some features that aren’t supported in the iPad app, such as Excel PivotTables.
For Word documents, you can use the Home tab to assign styles, modify character formatting, adjust line spacing and indents, and apply bullets and numbers to lists. If you compare the iPad’s Home ribbon to its desktop counterpart, you can spot some significant differences. You can’t define custom bullets or numbering formats on a tablet, nor can you define styles. For that sort of work you need to go back to the desktop.
Likewise, Word’s Insert ribbon lets you add page breaks and section breaks, insert a table, add pictures and shapes and text boxes, and create or edit hyperlinks. You won’t be able to create a table of contents or index from iPad, but you can quickly insert a simple footnote. Here, too, the goal of the iPad app is to enable a broad, but not deep, set of reading and editing options.
The developers of Word for the iPad lavished special attention on features for reviewing and collaborating on documents, with full support for revision marks and comments, in a display that is identical to what you’ll see on the desktop.
The rest here:http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-offi...-standard-for-tablet-productivity-7000027797/
OTB
Microsoft Office for iPad sets the gold standard for tablet productivity
By Ed Bott for The Ed Bott Report | March 27, 2014
Microsoft today released native iPad apps for its flagship Office programs—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The three new apps join the existing iOS apps from the Office family: OneNote, Lync, OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, and an OWA app for Exchange-based email.
After four years’ worth of speculation and anticipation, today’s releases are a welcome arrival for longtime Office users who’ve had to deal with incompatibilities and unsatisfying alternatives every time they picked up an iPad.
Make no mistake about it: These three apps are feature-rich, powerful tools for creating and editing Office documents. They look and act like their Office 2013 counterparts on Windows. And although these iPad apps obviously can’t replicate every feature of the full desktop programs, they deliver an impressive subset of those features. Anyone who was expecting Office Lite or a rehash of the underwhelming Office for iPhone will be pleasantly surprised.
Technically, there’s no such thing as Office for iPad. Each of the apps is a separate download from the App Store. They’re all designed for use on iPads running iOS 7 or later. (That restriction leaves out the original iPad owners, which won’t run iOS 7.)
As I predicted a year ago, the apps themselves are free, but you’ll need an Office 365 subscription (Home, Personal, Small Business, or Enterprise) to unlock their full potential. Unless you activate the app by signing in with your Office 365 credentials, you’ll be limited to reading Word documents, working with Excel data, and presenting PowerPoint slide shows. Only Office 365 subscribers get to create new documents or use any of the rich editing tools.
You can create and save files directly on an iPad, but these apps are expressly designed for cloud storage, using Microsoft’s OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint.
The apps themselves are fast and extremely responsive. They also walk the delicate tightrope between observing iPad interface conventions and building on the muscle memory of anyone who’s used the desktop apps included with an Office 365 subscription.
Tap the button in the upper left corner, for example, just as in Office 2013 apps, to display a File menu that lets you create a new document, reopen a recently used file, or browse through local and cloud storage to find a specific file. (Using the OneDrive for Business app, you can mark files or folders to be cached for offline use.
Commands for each app are grouped on ribbons that are more compact than their desktop alternatives. (To save space, you can tap the commands on the ribbon to hide the options for that tab, then tap again to make them visible again.) The number of options available on each ribbon is, likewise, limited in comparison to the full desktop programs.
CNET Video: Microsoft Office for iPad in action
What’s most impressive about these apps is how faithfully they display Office documents. Virtually all of the Word documents, Excel workbooks, and PowerPoint presentations I opened displayed perfectly on the iPad’s screen. The only exceptions involved documents with fonts that weren’t available on the iPad and some features that aren’t supported in the iPad app, such as Excel PivotTables.
For Word documents, you can use the Home tab to assign styles, modify character formatting, adjust line spacing and indents, and apply bullets and numbers to lists. If you compare the iPad’s Home ribbon to its desktop counterpart, you can spot some significant differences. You can’t define custom bullets or numbering formats on a tablet, nor can you define styles. For that sort of work you need to go back to the desktop.
Likewise, Word’s Insert ribbon lets you add page breaks and section breaks, insert a table, add pictures and shapes and text boxes, and create or edit hyperlinks. You won’t be able to create a table of contents or index from iPad, but you can quickly insert a simple footnote. Here, too, the goal of the iPad app is to enable a broad, but not deep, set of reading and editing options.
The developers of Word for the iPad lavished special attention on features for reviewing and collaborating on documents, with full support for revision marks and comments, in a display that is identical to what you’ll see on the desktop.
The rest here:http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-offi...-standard-for-tablet-productivity-7000027797/
