Microsoft Excel

All the Microsoft Office for iPad apps are wonderful and have great potential for business users. This should be a 5-star app and the gold standard for Office apps for iPad. #1. Unfortunately Microsoft chose to cripple this app by not allowing users to "Open In" other apps with full fidelity. This should be a no-brainer for Microsoft. It is favoring its OneDrive cloud storage over app flexibility. Apple learned this lesson early on with its iWork suite and scrambled to get ahead of its competition to the point of reworking its OS to allow users to open their documents in other apps. I expected much better from Microsoft than to have to resort to emailing documents to myself one at a time, no less. PDF conversion is nice but it doesn't go far enough. #2. What about a true folder system in the local iPad storage like the one that's available in OneDrive. Nudging users to OneDrive is not the answer even though Office 365 is required to unlock full capabilities. The $100 per year would be a lot less painful if I could have full Office capability. #3. The View menu in all apps is not a true View menu with full formatting capabilities including vertical and horizontal line spacing customization, and the other formatting capabilities that come with the desktop apps. #4. Where is Visio? If Microsoft is appealing to the business user then a standalone Visio app is a must. Not everyone can use Azure for business use and having Visio would make Microsoft Office for iPad truly formidable. Microsoft, you have a long way to go.

I love that Excel runs on the Ipad, Iphone as well as Mac. But the Ipad and Iphone version are far cries from the Mac (or Windows) versions. Certain features I use often are missing, like creating or editing validation. Editing within a cell has got worse; I find myself manually backspacing or erasing whole words or numbers instead of being able to select the characters I want to change. In a spreadsheet with a long list of rows, sometimes changing one row in explicitly resets the cursor to the top of the sheet, requiring a lot of scrolling (which is more difficult on an IOS device than a Mac). Entering unfamiliar formulas is still cumbersome; I wish Microsoft would use AI to figure out what I likely mean and suggest a logical answer rather than 20 years of “Too many (or few)” parameters, “Mismatched parentheses”, Invalid formulas . I have to scroll up and down or exit excel to reset rows that sometimes don’t display properly. Dropbox integration remains buggy and limited: I have to constantly browse the top Dropbox folder to see files stored on Dropbox (but not all the time); I can’t use Excel offline from offline Dropbox files; I have to remember to open and store each spreadsheet in Excel. This is supposed to be a productivity enhancing, not frustratingly productivity zapping tool. For a product on it’s umpteenth edition, the bug quantity should be going down and the feature compatibility with other platforms should be going up.

If you're familiar with Excel, or you need some of the more advanced features, the iPadOS app does a pretty good job. Most people can use Google sheets or other free spreadsheet products and they'll be quite happy. It's great to see that Microsoft has added some useful features to the iPad app such as conditional formatting. I hope they continue to add additional desktop features to the app. Given the power of M series chips, there's really no reason not to (other than fear of cannibalizing desktop sales). Of course, if Apple would let us run macOS as a boot alternative to iPadOS, that would be even better, but I doubt that will happen. Anyway, Excel is a great product. Having used it for 30+ years in business, I find the iPad app meets my needs probably 99% of the time. Occasionally, a really large or complex spreadsheet will need to be done on my Windows 11 PC, which, ironically, is less powerful than my iPad. I suspect the limitation is probably iPadOS and Microsoft has done a pretty good job including a good selection of capabilities. The iPhone app is more useful for viewing just because of the size of the platform. I find that a 13 inch iPad, and even an 11 inch iPad, do a great job with most spreadsheets. If you need Excel, I think you'll be pretty happy using it on an iPad.