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back to article CloudOn brings Office to UK iPad users

After a rocky start, CloudOn is now opening its free application, which allows limited use of Microsoft’s Office suite on an iPad, to UK users. The application works in synchronization with the online file sharing service Dropbox, and allows users to view and edit Word documents and PowerPoint presentations, as well as to …

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  1. Gordon 10

    Errrrr

    Arent there already dozens if office suites for the iPad that can read and write office files. What makes this one so special?

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Err

    "After a rocky start, CloudOn is now opening its free application, which allows limited use of Microsoft’s Office suite on an iPad, to UK users."

    It's Microsoft, so will it crash all the time?

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  3. James Pickett (Jp)

    It's Actual Office

    Well, it's actual Word. excel and PowerPoint for a start.

    It's also the only way (to my knowledge) to use 'Track Changes' on Word documents on an iPad so I'm very pleased.

    Wonder if onlive will get their take on this out in the UK?

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  4. Jason Hindle

    Might be worth a try....

    Assuming we're talking something that can connect to the Windows Live cloud (which works well BTW). But..... I thought Microsoft were supposed to be producing an all singing, all dancing iPad version of Office?

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  5. James 100

    An iPad version of Office would no doubt sell quite well - just like the Mac version of Office - but also negate the big selling point of a Windows 8 tablet against iPad. "It's like an iPad, but instead of all those popular apps you can run Office" might just hold water; "it's like an iPad, you can still run Office but not all the other popular apps" sounds doomed.

    I'm sure it's been a dilemma for MS before - preserve Office's ubiquity by supporting non-Windows platforms, or use Office as leverage to support Windows? They've mostly come down on the first side of that - though dropping macros in Office 2008 no doubt pushed business users back towards Windows a bit to use Office 2007 instead.

    Office for iPad would sell well, but quite possibly kill off Windows 8 as a tablet platform. On the other hand, if tablets succeed without Office, that could propagate back to a desktop without Office as well...

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      re "An iPad version of Office would no doubt sell quite well"...

      Would it? I thought the same until I read this

      http://minimalmac.com/post/17758177061/microsofts-biggest-miss

      It seems that not only are people realising there are alternative to Windows, but they also don't actually *need* Office.

      I got a copy included with my lappy, but with hindsight it would've been a total waste of money if I'd shelled out for it myself considering the number of times I've needed office-specific functionality

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  6. Sirius Lee

    Virtual desktop

    Applications like remote spark allow a virtual desktop to appear on any device including the iPad. Remote spark also supports Microsoft's virtual application features built into Terminal Services. Since Office *must* run on a Windows machine, it's likely that this application is doing something like virtualizing a Windows PC. It would provide an explanation for why they 'ran out' of resources. At least one of the comments on the CloudOn page reports that it can be slow - which is likely to to be true if remote machines are shared or if the path to the remote machine is slow.

    As a Remote spark user I can attest that it works really well. It works by drawing the RDP session on to an HTML5 canvas. This alone explains why the service is not also available on Android: HTML5 support by the native browser is not good enough.

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