in-between thing: microsoft office app for ipad

Last night, a mere day after writing up Mobile Thing #6,  I learned that Microsoft is releasing a version of Office for the iPad, which was confirmed this morning: Microsoft to Offer Office for iPad, Maybe a Bit Late. At first I was relieved that I wouldn't have to see if CloudOn fixes its problems. What better to play with Office than Office itself? Then I saw the catch: read all the documents you want for free, but if you want to make any, you'll have to subscribe to Office 365: $100/year.

You know how I said I'd given up on accessing Office documents on my iPad? You can still consider it given up.

23 Mobile Things #6: Creating & Editing Docs

I'd pretty much given up on the idea of ever working with Microsoft Office programs on my iPad. Even when "tablet" meant "iPad," Microsoft didn't make Office tablet-friendly. Now there are Android and Windows tablets out there as well, and the few rumors I'd ever heard that there was going to be an Office suite of apps for iOS have died. But the end result is that I don't use Office nearly as much as I used to personally. I still use it at work, yes, but that might have a lot to do with the fact that we hardly use tablets or smartphones for work at my library.

I decided to try CloudOn. I loaded it onto the iPad weeks ago, and then promptly ignored it. Remember how I said I barely use Office anymore? I didn't need to write anything, so I had nothing to test CloudOn with! But I finally sat down and created a document and can now report my findings.

Good

If you can use Microsoft Word—and why would you be doing this if you couldn't?—you can use CloudOn. The app's mini-tour when you first log in was enough to get going. The app emulated Word successfully: not as visually attractive as Word itself is, but everything was clearly labeled and was where I expected it to be. The app saved my test document to Dropbox without a hitch, and I was then able to pull it up in Word itself without error messages or mangled text.

Bad

The lag was maddening. Type a few words rapidly, look up, and realize that none of them have appeared on the screen. Wait...wait...there they are! Resume typing. Wait again. GAH! This is why I don't use Google Docs; it has the same infuriating delay between keystroke and letter appearance. I watch the screen as I compose, and if the words don't show up, I lose track of what I'm typing.

The second problem was a glitch. I'm guessing there's a conflict in the app somewhere between what's pretending to be Word's spell-checker and Auto-correct. (I have this same issue when I try to email stuff from Twitterrific through the iOS mail app.) What happened was that whenever a possibly misspelled word popped up, the first letter or two of the correction would be duplicated. For instance, when it tried to replace something I'd typed with "things," what appeared on the screen was "tthings." What excellent motivation to never, ever mistype a word! Because if you do, and this glitch happens, and you have to go back and manually correct the error…

…the third problem kicks in. You know how to move the cursor in iOS, you touch the screen where you want it to move to? And if you're slightly off, you roll your finger a bit to one side or the other to reposition the cursor? Well, that signals to CloudOn that you want the Word feature where you highlight something and a box with the most common formatting options appears. Which it did. Which meant that I couldn't see the cursor to see if it was in the right place for me to backspace and erase the offending duplicated letters. GAH!²

All in all

This is an app with potential. It's got some problems, but fix them, and this app will come in handy. Like I said, we still use Microsoft Office at work, and if I found myself away from work but needing to access our documents and spreadsheets, this would do a good job. At this point, I'll probably still compose simple documents in Evernote if I have to, but fix those glitches, and this will give Evernote some good competition.