Microsoft Office for the iPad: It’s Delightfully Familiar

The plan sounded simple: Get an iPad. Get a keyboard for the iPad. Get Office for iPad. Then, finally, review Office for iPad.

The first step was trivial — I have iPads coming out of my ears — and the next two weren’t much more difficult. Harry McCracken, who writes about technology for Time magazine and is an expert on iPad keyboards (among other things), recommended that I get the Belkin Ultimate Wireless Keyboard and Case, which sells for around $100. He was right. The keyboard is great.

As for Office for iPad, that was just a matter of going to Apple’s App Store and installing Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. The apps — which Microsoft unveiled last week after years of will-it-or-won’t-it speculation — are free to download, though they require a subscription to Microsoft’s Office 365 plan to unlock most features. (Subscriptions start at $9.99 per month.)

Microsoft gave me a complimentary subscription to run the apps. I typed in the activation code and there they were, finally: Microsoft’s world-conquering productivity suite on Apple’s world-conquering tablet.

So here I sit, after using the software for a week, ready to review Office for the iPad … and I have to confess I’m sort of stumped about what to say beyond issuing a series of simple declarations of praise: It’s really good. I like it. I’ll probably use it quite often. You should give it a try. I bet you’ll feel the same way.

Reviewing Microsoft Office is a bit like reviewing a member of one’s family. You’ve lived with it all your life, and for better or worse, you’ve learned all its best features and its worst flaws. Also, you can’t really escape it. Sure, in times past, you’ve tried to leave it for some fresh-faced alternative. Things were said, feelings were hurt, one of you let the other down.

But in the end you’ve always returned, because for one reason or another, nothing other than Word, Excel and PowerPoint worked quite as well for you and your colleagues. (Don’t write in to tell me you’ve managed to ditch Office or your family members or both; I know there are people who have. But you are the lonely exception, not the norm.)

Considering all this, the most startling thing about using Office on an iPad is how comfortable it feels. Sure, the tablet version, which has to accommodate touch input, not a mouse pointer, looks different from the desktop version. The stripped-down interface has fewer advanced features than on your desktop, and the menus are blessedly minimalist, showing only the main options you’d need for any given task.

Yet despite the new look, everything about the software is obvious. For the most part, the iPad versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote work exactly as they do on PCs and Macs.

This is a testament to the designers and engineers at Microsoft and to the power of long-term training. Other than my web browser, there’s no software I use more often than Word, so I’ve internalized all its tics. I know the keyboard shortcuts, the menu options, the ins and outs of esoteric features like Track Changes. As I used the iPad version, I felt it click into the same neural grooves dug out by the years I’ve spent on desktop Office. If you’re familiar with Office, you won’t face any learning curve in the new version.

If you love Office on your computer, you’ll love it on your iPad. If you’ve always hated it, that won’t change, either; now you’ll just have one more place to hate it.

Of course, the fact that Office is familiar doesn’t mean it’s the best set of office programs available. Over the years I have tried several alternatives to Word, and I’ve liked many of them. Try Quip, for instance, a great word processor for iOS and Android devices. Or Draft, a fantastic Web-based alternative.

If you can successfully cut yourself off from the Office empire, then there’s really no reason for you to choose Office for iPad. It’s very good, but at $10 a month, it’s only of interest to people who have Office on all their other devices and want to integrate the iPad into their workflow.

But that’s not a small number. Microsoft still books tens of billions in revenue on Office every year, the vast majority from sales to businesses. Offering the software on the iPad is a smart, simple way to keep those customers hooked. The iPad version puts Office in front of workers more often, making the suite even more indispensable to the organizations that use it.

It’s hard not to see this as a win for Apple, too. The iPad version of Office is the first Office designed for a touch interface. You can’t get touch-friendly Word, Excel and PowerPoint on a Samsung tablet. You can’t even get it on Microsoft’s own Surface tablet (Microsoft say that a touch version of Office for Windows will come soon).

For years, Apple has asserted that the iPad is the most business-friendly tablet around. Microsoft has often argued otherwise. Now its case has fallen apart. If you want to use Microsoft’s best mobile software, you’ll need to buy Apple’s hardware.