Tag: Microsoft office »

Today Microsoft has confirmed that Office is on its way to the iPad. In fact, the entire suite (Word, Excel, and Powerpoint) is available now for free, with a subscription service available for full functionality.

Word is in many ways the same word processing program that you're no doubt already familiar with, only retooled for touch screens. Tables, charts, graphics, a table of contents, and all those other useful features are available on your iPad. Charts and other images that have been imported from Excel can be edited from within the app, and text will dynamically adjust around these items as you drag them around the page. Co-op features are also built in, which will allow multiple users to edit a document simultaneously in real-time across a number of different devices. No worries about things getting too confusing, though. It's also possible to display markup so that you can see what edits have been made, have conversations with your fellow users within the margins, and so on.

Excel carries over all the familiar features from its PC counterpart, along with the obvious changes for a touch-based interface. You can sort through chart layouts quickly and easily, and the app will even make recommendations for you with samples that use your data. Even the keyboard has been adjusted to cater to iPad users, with a customized numeric keyboard that should make data entry a lot easier.

PowerPoint allows you to import and edit your slides and images, includes all those popular transitional effects everybody seems to love, and has added some new functions that are specific to touch screens. First, you can call up a digital laser pointer by tapping and holding your finger on the screen, in order to make it easier to point out specific elements in a presentation. Second, you can add annotations by drawing highlights directly on the screen.

All of the apps in the Office 365 series also share data across multiple devices (iPhone, iPad, PC, etc) using Microsoft's OneDrive service. The entire collection is available now, for free, and uses the Office Mobile subscription-based model. So you can opt to pay $9.99/month or $99.99/year (family) or between $60.00/user/year and $180/user/year (business) in order to access the complete list of features across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Microsoft Office, which debuted on the iPhone in June of last year, is finally expected to come to the iPad next week via Satya Nadella's first press event as CEO of Microsoft. Members of the media have been receiving invites to this supposedly mobile-first and cloud-first press conference, and according to sources for The Verge the event will mark many major announcements - with Office coming to Apple's tablet being only one.

The iPad version of Microsoft Office is expected to be much like the iPhone version, and as such will require a subscription to Microsoft's Office 365 service to be able to edit documents. Document types supported in this mobile version are the same as the iPhone version; you'll be able to edit within the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps.

We'll be sure to let you know here at 148Apps when the app is officially announced.

When CloudOn launched, it was so popular that the service was up and down for several days.. This apparently was just based on usage from United States users, as CloudOn has now announced that their app is available in the UK.

This means that more users will get to use Microsoft Office applications like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel using CloudOn’s cloud computing technologies. As this is a cloud-based solution, there appears to be mild input lag when operating with the apps. Files still can be saved and loaded from Dropbox, although these require to be saved in Office formats; opening up plaintext or markdown formats in Word isn’t possible at the moment. This is all still available for the low, low cost of free as the service begins to roll out. For users looking for a new way to use their familiar Microsoft Office tools directly on their iPad, this is a very viable option.

When looking back over some of the most exciting developments of the last two years, it would be hard to ignore the groundbreaking cloud gaming solution, OnLive.  The company was founded around the idea of taking dated hardware and allowing gamers to play a high-end gaming experience, all through the streaming power of the internet.

The technology behind the service is impressive enough to provide a quality gaming experience, with very little lag time, which makes today's announcement a relative no-brainer.  OnLive is planning to apply this streaming technology to desktop virtualization.  All those crazy pipe dreams about being able to have a true desktop experience away from the keyboard may finally be coming to fruition.

iPad will be the first iOS device to be able to fully take advantage of this new technology, when they debut their free OnLive Desktop app soon.  Among the pieces of software available for virtualization at launch will be Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, which are viewed by many as the holy trinity of office productivity.

Though the base application will be a free, there will be microtransations that can be used to add in additional storage space, applications and, you guessed it, games.  There are also plans of releasing a professional tier application, for $9.99 a month. This second service would bump the storage space from a mere 2GBs to a hulking 50GBs, as well as add in even more applications and features.

If the technology works as well as their gaming service has, business folks will undoubtedly be lining up in droves to take part.  Better yet, the company's use of cloud computing could put the need for purchasing a high end workhorse PC on the back burner, in exchange for an iPad.  That seems like the kind of trade off that the mobile masses could strongly support.  Plus, this sure makes it a whole lot easier to suggest expensing an iPad on the company's dime. THANK YOU ONLIVE!

Source: Gigaom

Recently, a startup named CloudOn launched their eponymous app that offers users the ability to edit Microsoft Office files on their iPad. The app supported Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and Excel spreadsheets, all available through CloudOn's WorkSpace technology. As well, it supported Dropbox synchronization for uploading and editing files from the cloud-based storage service, and the ability to open attachments from the email client in the app directly. The app also launched for free, which compared to most apps with similar functionality was a steep discount.

Astute readers will notice the usage of past tense throughout the article so far. That's because a free app with the ability to use Microsoft Office on the iPad was apparently quite popular. The app launched on January 3rd, and was so initially popular that CloudOn had to pull the app from the App Store in order to meet demand. They're currently accepting invitations to get back in to the service when the app relaunches, though no date has been offered for when it will be back up for download. Until then, we'll have to suffer the tyranny of editing our Office documents on our computer, or with pricey paid apps!

Sunday here in the US and what pops into the App Store? Documents To Go from Dataviz. Documents To Go is a document syncing, storage, viewing, and editing app with some very interesting and unique features. This app has been hotly anticipated as a top quality business app and a great way to edit documents while you only have access via your phone.

Dataviz has had a long history in the Mac world. They started out doing document conversion software for early Macs -- remember when Macintosh software couldn't read Windows files? Of late they have focused in on providing syncing and editing software for mobile devices. Their Documents To Go application has been available on many other mobile platforms, Palm, Windows, Blackberry. This release on the iPhone brings them back to the Apple world.

This initial release comes on two forms, the main Documents To Go and an Exchange Attachments edition. Both versions consist of both a desktop application (Windows or Mac), and an iPhone OS application. The desktop application allows you to choose which files you want to sync to the mobile device -- either individual files or folders. If you choose a folder, any new files in that folder will be automatically synced. We should point out that this is true 2-way syncing. Changes either on the desktop or the iPhone are synced automatically when the devices next connect. Much better than many file storage and viewing apps that only do one way transfer and fail to sync any changes.

The document types that you can sync and view include all of the usual Microsoft Office and iWork '08 formats. Also supported are all of the basic text files and image formats that the iPhone can display.

Beyond the normal file viewing, this initial release also allows you to edit Microsoft Word documents (.doc and .docx formats). The Word file editor is pretty robust and feature rich and seems to do a really good job maintaining the document formatting. Dataviz have promised a free upgrade to Documents To Go with Microsoft Excel editing as well though that's not currently available.

Documents To Go's major competitor on the iPhone is QuickOffice which we previously reviewed and found to be pretty solid. QuickOffice does offer one feature that Documents To Go has yet to implement, Microsoft Excel editing. We'll take a full look at Documents To Go in the coming days.

Documents To Go is available now at an introductory price of just $4.99 (for 2 weeks).

The second version of Documents To Go released today, the Exchange Attachment edition, does all of the above plus gives you direct access to your Microsoft Exchange server email attachments.

Appearing as a new folder on your documents list, this support allows you to download, view, and even edit and forward documents attached to your email messages. You are presented with all of your email messages that have attachments and can view the messages and the attachments in a more file focused view, with the attachments at the top of the message. From there you can save the attachments locally, forward them, or edit them.

In addition to getting access to your attachments stored on the Exchange server, you can forward any attachment you have stored locally in an email via your Exchange server.

This extra support for remote attachments storage should be a great extra feature for those people that use Exchange.

The Exchange Attachment edition is available now at an introductory price of $9.99 (for 2 weeks).

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