All but full-fat MS Office to be had on iPads, Droidenslabben for NOWT Microsoft Office's iPad apps have been well received since their first release in March this year – other than the annoyance of needing a suitable Office 365 subscription to use the apps for more than just viewing documents. Now that bugbear has been banished: the updated versions require only a Microsoft account to enable …
Why would any features be blocked.crippled in a FREE version? If they put all the good stuff in, nobody would pay.
Seems they've given enough for people to write letters and personal spreadsheets, anyone using it day-to-day for more serious stuff would need to pay.
"If they put all the good stuff in, nobody would pay."
Don't knock Microsoft's tablets - it turns out they can be useful after all.
It's just about writing the code but the fact you have to rewrite big chunks for each OS, especially the UI side which is pretty darn important. Clearly the effort went in to iOS first and that would require them using OBJ-C (well not having to but on a project that size it would make sense) which means it's likely an entirely separate development team than those who would work on a WP version.
Office was never ported to C# in the past eleven years, for very good reasons. These are not the applications C# and .NET is good for - that's C/C++ realm. Guess MS had to use Objective-C for the iOS version , Java and probably the NDK (which would ease C/C++ code porting) for Android, and C++ for Windows.
Windows 8 and Windows Phone too made a U-turn returning to C++ as the main development language, although .NET and HTML/Js are also fully supported for simpler and less demanding applications.
"The updated versions require only a Microsoft account to enable users to create and edit documents in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
That said, if you want the “full experience”, as the company puts it, you will still need an Office 365 subscription."
I don't want a Microsoft account; I don't want an Office 365 subscription; and I certainly don't want my documents running through someone else's server. Libre Office'll do me, and I shall just have to live without MS's extra features and them deliberately breaking the formatting for every other program. If formafting is important, I'll use a PDF.
I remember when my parents told me about Microsoft Office and how they all used to have to use it, as it was the only thing available.
Oddly, my children take that view and I'm the one who uses something else instead.
Blame the teaching of product-specific IT at schools for that.
I remember when schools taught computing rather than just IT and office. Of course, that was back in the 80's when the BBC micro was king. My son just expressed an interest in learning to program so I pulled out the Sinclair Spectrum and let him get on with it. Sir Clive would be proud, but I'm saving the BEEB for once he's more familiar with the language. Single keyword entry was such a nice feature.
Anyway, he is happily unaware of IT and just wants to know how computers work and how to program them. Microsoft getting such a stranglehold on schools has been a terrible detriment to those kids who were really interested. Thank goodness for Linux.
Does the Spectrum run Linux?
A lot of programmes - including many of those later working on Linux - learned to code on DOS and maybe Windows machines. Without them, probably there would be no Linux too.
Just running a Linux machine doesn't mean at all you will learn how to code - in some ways the lack of good and easy to use IDEs doesn't help at all. Tools like TurboPascal did a lot to bring people into programming, something is available, yet the Linux attitude "if you don't use vi and autotools you're not a real programmer" doesn't help at all.
A lot of Spectrum and Commodore users back then used them just as gaming machines and little more, not everybody learned how to program them but maybe the "hello world" BASIC attempt. Especially because then any non-trivial applicatio required a deep knowledge of the underlying "OS" and hardware, and often access to some documentation not readily available. You needed to be very determinated to learn it, and that probably helped to select developers in a darwinian way...
> Especially because then any non-trivial applicatio required a deep knowledge of the underlying "OS" and hardware, and often access to some documentation not readily available.
Complete nonsense. 'Back then' there were dozens of computer magazines and piles of books aimed at hobby programming. I still have a collection. Apple II, BBC, Atari, Amiga, Amstrad, Sinclair were all catered for extensively with many coding examples in many languages.
The problem came in the 90s when Microsoft convinced schools to teach children to be consumers of computer software, principally Office, rather than teaching computing (including programming). Magazines similarly changed to promote software products rather than programming - advertising was a more important source of revenue than sales to hobbiests.
The Raspberry Pi and Arduino (and similar) are bringing back the days of hobby programming.
> Linux ... the lack of good and easy to use IDEs doesn't help at all.
It may well be that you are completely unaware of the languages, IDEs and many other tools that are available on Linux, but 'lack of good and easy' is not one of its attributes.
Quite a high proportion of them aren't entirely equipped to grow beards at any stage; something to do with x's and y's, from what I dimly remember about O-level Biology (always got that bit confused with Algebra, which could explain my dire Maths A-level result). Does that mean they don't ever get to use Linux, even if it came in pink?
"Blame the teaching of product-specific IT at schools for that."
True - but that includes the schools which accepted Apple's hefty discounts to create a zillion Mac users... which, in my humble opinion, resulted in a zillion iPhone users, and now here we are with MS apps on Apple products.
Little Choice?
On my Android devices, I have too much choice:
Google Docs (Docs/Sheets/Slides)
QuickOffice
OfficeSuite Pro 8
They all work just fine with pretty much everything I have ever thrown at them (Doc, DocX, PDF, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX)
So why do I need any stinking Microsoft disruptive Office tricks? Answer: I don;t/
Are they real choices? Actually, the only real competitor of Office is Open/Libre Office. The application you mention could be competitors of the discontinued Microsof Works maybe - nothing more. If they fit your need, and you don't need nothing more tha Android, it's ok, but they are far from being complete office productivity suites.
And sure, in the mobile space you're going to see many office wannabe apps, it happens on all "new" OS, it happened on PalmOS too, nothing really new... how many will survive is yet to see.
Well I went to Google Play to install the app and - guess what - it's not compatible with my tablet, the latest Nexus 7 running Android 4.4. If you follow the links (find the small type) to try to find what tablets are supported, good ol' Microsoft does the run-around and you eventually find yourself back on the same page. So no help there from MS. It wouldn't surprise me if only one or 2 large screen tablets are supported. Anyone got it to install?
Actually, if there's something MS does very well is compatibility - especially at the binary level. You can still run a lot of software compiled several years ago - 16 bit support was dropped only in 64 bit versions of Windows. New releases may not work on older OS - but guess it's a bit too far asking Office 2013 runs on no longer supported OS.
While in other OSes unless you can - if you can without extensive changes - recompile your apps you have very little chance to run whatever was written or compiled just a few years ago.
> Actually, if there's something MS does very well is compatibility - especially at the binary level.
Given that the topic is mobile devices then Microsoft has been very poor at compatibility. Windows Mobile 6.x apps were completely killed by Windows Phone 7, which in turn was dead-ended by WP8. Not just binary incompatibility but the complete tool chain.
> While in other OSes unless you can - if you can without extensive changes - recompile your apps you have very little chance to run whatever was written or compiled just a few years ago.
That is just nonsense dogma. I have programs written 20 years ago that still run.
And like all free things, regardless of source. It is a lure, a hook, bait.
It will have use for some in free format, it will earn revenue from those who want more. Makes no odds to me, I manage to communicate with my clients well enough using pdf, odf, plain text, txt msg and word of mouth.
I don't need Microsoft for anything either, others do. They are called consumers, they don't think much beyond convenience, some don't think much at all. So if it is convenient, free and easy to get/use then it will find a user base. It just won't find one here.
Yep. It might be £0, but it's far from "free".
Tie yourself and others into proprietary formats, and be at the whim of a single entity who's only purpose is to extract as much money from their customers as possible? Not for me, thanks!
Hopefully this type of stuff will be eradicated within a decade - it's not good for the consumer. If Microsoft (genuinely) headed this direction, I would cheer for them as I would anyone else.
Do you believe someone buying Apple cares about tying itself into a proprietary ecosystem?
Anyway Office document formats are today very well documented. But people like you are still living in the past decade...
And I prefer to pay software with money, than with all my data as Google likes. Money, I know how much I spend, and once spent, I do not care where they go and how they're used. My data, I do not know how much they collect, and I worried about where they go and how are used.
I really hope soon this kind of people data collection will ne fully eradicated - it's not really good for anybody - which instead of being a consumer, becomes consumed.
Do you believe someone buying Apple cares about tying itself into a proprietary ecosystem?
Of course they don't care, because they don't know any better. They put up what's given to them, regardless of what's good for them. But how many times do Apple users think "hmm, I wouldn't mind giving <non-apple thing> a try, but I'm heavily invested in Apple"? So they stay on the hamster wheel. Fortunately, Apple products (from what I see as a non-apple user) are quite compelling. Microsoft software, on the other hand (of which I am a long-time user), are dreadful - constant churn, doesn't quite do what you want but it's ok because you're compatible with everyone else uses it, as long as you keep upgrading.
Anyway Office document formats are today very well documented. But people like you are still living in the past decade...
Have you read them? I have - I was only making a reader. You have to basically implement Word to have any success.
And I prefer to pay software with money, than with all my data as Google likes. Money, I know how much I spend, and once spent, I do not care where they go and how they're used. My data, I do not know how much they collect, and I worried about where they go and how are used
My data is also my data. That's one of the reasons I don't use "cloud apps" where possible.
I do, however, care how companies spend the money I give them - ie, I'd like them to spend it on improving the products I pay for (and profit - their motivator). What I do object to is wasting it on fads, bandwagons, and "me too" projects while letting "my" products stagnate.
I really hope soon this kind of people data collection will ne fully eradicated - it's not really good for anybody - which instead of being a consumer, becomes consumed.
It doesn't bother me, because I don't let it affect me (I don't provide data if I don't need to). But I guess some people don't like paying money for things - so they stealth pay with their privacy.
"...doesn't quite do what you want but it's ok because you're compatible with everyone else uses it, as long as you keep upgrading."
"Doesn't quite do what you want" is probably the most defining feature of my relationship with Excel in particular, but MS applications in general. It always seems to fall well short of what you need, necessitating some monstrous workaround, or often as not in my case a trip for the data to BBEdit. To be fair, on the other hand it does some things unexpectedly well, date formatting in particular is useful once you've got the hang of it.
Cross compatibility between the Windows and Mac versions has always been a joke; I wouldn't dream of moving a document with any level of complexity over and back and expect it to be usable after the trip - easier these days just to stick to the Windows version in Fusion on the Mac.
To be honest the 'missing' features in the free version wouldn't bother me at all, even in Excel, although as a rule I'll also always pay for software if the alternative is my data as payment. As your comment suggests, most of the reason for using Office at all in my case is simply dealing with other peoples documents, barring that I'd have little need for Office at all.
I don't think in the case of Office its principally consumers that are responsible for its continuing dominance, its the business mindset that seems too conservative and lacking in imagination to think beyond the MS tax. Most individuals learn from that and so just have it at home because a) they know more or less how it works b) they occasionally need to interact with others who have it. Our local council, quite unbelievably still publishes half of its official documents as docx or xlsx, even when most would be better suited to pdf - the Register ran an article on them a few years ago when they announced they would use "Why not Microsoft?" as a much derided official policy on purchasing software. I think its a real shame the Office mostly-monopoly perpetuates like this, because overall it soaks up a lot of money without delivering any real value in most instances - one the one hand my girlfriend is quite brilliant at producing well formatted and very usable documents in Word, while I'm a lot happier with a 30 quid text editor.
All that aside, MS have generally made a decent fist of the ios apps for the ipad; they're remarkably usable and generally avoid the circular MS logic that goes nowhere, and even the now defunct all in one app for the iphone was useful for reviewing stuff - quite an achievement for such a tiny screen.
'Of course they don't care, because they don't know any better. They put up what's given to them, regardless of what's good for them'
This can be said also of Google products users, which will use everithynh thrown at them as long as it is free or almost.
I did read all the docs, because I use them - who said software development is easy? Do you believe other formats are easier to implement?
It's not only the cloud to be a risk, it's OS like Android and ChromeOS designed to funnel everything to entities like Google, or app like Chrome designed to track you.
It's far easier to vote for money than everything else. Bad sales of Win 8 forced MS to rethink its product strategy. Not so easy to do thar while your data are 'collected' anyway. If you believe it doesn't affect you, you may be wrong...
Nominate as most arrogant comment of the day... if only they were as informed, smart and awesome as me they'd clearly take my viewpoint because that is objectively the only sensible viewpoint any right minded individual COULD take.
Get over yourself.
Do you believe other formats are easier to implement?
I do.
MS office formats have historically been a dump of internal memory, with scant retrospective documentation. There is a vast number of documents that have been designed for interoperability from the start, Office formats aren't one of them.
People's complaints about non-Office is that they don't render Office documents properly. I wonder why that is.
It looks your knowledge of Office formats is very outdated, especially of the "x" formats. Did you ever tried to implement OpenDocument support?
Sure, Office formats were not designed for interoperability. Nor Photoshop PSD, Autodesk DWG, or many other application formats nobody complains about... even PDF was not an open standard until 2008 - and not fully. Yet nobody complained about PDF.
Most cameras outputs their own RAW formats, none desiged for interoperability (Adobe DNG didn't get much support).
But now Office formats are fully documented, XML based, and documentation is no scanty at all. Also standard are good, but they also imply a usually slow approval process and risk "design-by-commitee" issues.
If non Office applications are unable to display Office documents properly ask their developers. In the Libre/OPenOffice case probably the open source model is not working well in this case, because developers are not interested in fully supporting MS formats and adapt their code to them - I guess it's also a political stance - look at what happened when OpenOffice was in Oracle hands through the Sun acquisition...
Wasn't the ooxml standard the one that Microsoft was pushing so that it could comply with European requirements that documents be saved in a standard format.
I can't understand your logic on why open/libre office wont work with Microsoft formats. Microsoft is the dominant player, a big argument for not using open/libre office is because of the lack of interoperability with everyone else using Office and the legacy of office documents laying around that is only compatible with MS products.
There is absolutely no reason why libre/open office devs wouldn't want their product to work with Microsofts.
On the flip side there are some very solid reasons that Microsoft wouldn't want competitors to be able to work with their products.
There is a good quote from wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML
If ISO were to give OOXML with its 6546 pages the same level of review that other standards have seen, it would take 18 years (6576 days for 6546 pages) to achieve comparable levels of review to the existing ODF standard (871 days for 867 pages) which achieves the same purpose and is thus a good comparison.
Considering that OOXML has only received about 5.5% of the review that comparable standards have undergone, reports about inconsistencies, contradictions and missing information are hardly surprising
If MS simply said that the format is closed and will not be made available, I would be fine with that.
The fact is that they forced a standard through ISO so that they could pretend to governments and organisations that their formats were based on open standards and that they wouldn't locked into a single vendor for ever.
> Sure, Office formats were not designed for interoperability. Nor Photoshop PSD, Autodesk DWG, or many other application formats nobody complains about...
Actually DWG was complained about for many years. Autodesk also had AutoCAD DXF which _was_ designed for interoperability:
"""AutoCAD DXF (Drawing Interchange Format, or Drawing Exchange Format) is a CAD data file format developed by Autodesk[1] for enabling data interoperability between AutoCAD and other programs."""
> even PDF was not an open standard until 2008 - and not fully. Yet nobody complained about PDF.
Actually PDF _was_ designed for interoperability. It is _Portable_ Document Format and the specification was freely available since 1993.
> Most cameras outputs their own RAW formats,
RAW is a direct dump of the sensor data, of course they are all different, even between models of one brand. But almost all cameras will also produce standard JPEGs, or only JPEGs, or both.
> But now Office formats are fully documented, XML based, and documentation is no scanty at all.
It is certainly not 'scanty'. Bloated is what it is. Several thousand pages because is contains a mishmash of 30 years of ad-hoc development. For example there are three specifications within that of 'tables' because MS Office implements them in 3 different ways.
While the OOXML spec has been around for a while there were many years when MS did not implement it so other programs had to implement the standard _and_ 'what MS does', adding to the complexity.
> Also standard are good, but they also imply a usually slow approval process and risk "design-by-commitee" issues.
While MS Office has followed a completely different path over the years of ad-hoc changes.
We despise all proprietary formats, not just Office ... however, this article discusses MS Office, so we concentrate on MS Office, here. BTW, PDF is pretty well reverse-engineered and later documented - there are numerous tools out there that do incredible stuff with PDF.
>It looks your knowledge of Office formats is very outdated, especially of the "x" formats. Did you ever tried to implement OpenDocument support?
That should be:
It looks your knowledge of Office formats is very outdated, the [new] "x" formats [are pretty well documented, so much so, that Office Mac often breaks formatting]. Did you ever [try] to implement OpenDocument support?
Nuff said.
> People's complaints about non-Office is that they don't render Office documents properly. I wonder why that is.
The main reason for different renderings is that the fonts are not available and substitutes are used. Another is the differences between printer settings and capability. This can happen between Windows machines even when both are running Office.
"Tie yourself and others into proprietary formats, and be at the whim of a single entity who's only purpose is to extract as much money from their customers as possible?"
Proprietary, open formats which are a recognised standard that other major players support?
Oh, no, a company who exists to make money. If only we could all work for free!
Proprietary, open formats
That's an oxymoron.
Oh, no, a company who exists to make money.
Everyone wants companies who make money - that's not the issue.
It's being forcibly tied into a single entity, being at their mercy, and without the ability to move away is what the informed people are against.
If you've chosen to go all in, then I'm happy for you - you've chosen that.
I also use Office - and that's my choice (I get it with MSDN).
yeah because there was no controversies over OOXML being 'fast tracked' through ISO certification with vote stacking and bribery etc.
Also, not sure what other major players actually support ooxml?
Nothing wrong with a company making money. I have nothing against the office 365 product but anyone who thinks that Microsoft aren't trying to draw people in so they can then lock them in using any means possible have drunk way too much kool-aide.
Because other companies don't try to lock them into their products as well? What's Android for? To lock you into the Google ecosystem - and allow it to make money selling your data. Even Linux vendors try to lock-in you into their products. Doesn't Sony locks you in with its PS consoles? Even web sites try to lock you in...
So why MS is evil, and Google is not? Just because MS asks money for its products?
> What's Android for? To lock you into the Google ecosystem
It actually doesn't. Kindle runs Android with no Google, even Nokia's X was Android without Google. Many other phone vendors produce Android phones without Google.
> Even Linux vendors try to lock-in you into their products.
You will have to explain that because it looks like dogma without any foundation. Which Linux vendor does anything to prevent a different vendor's version of Linux being installed ?
> So why MS is evil, and Google is not? Just because MS asks money for its products?
No. That is not the reason that MS is evil.
I for one look forward to comparing this to wps office on android.
The article didn't mention macros. Does anyone know if they will be supported (in a limited capacity)? If so that's awesome news for anyone that has to support finance or works in B.I., if not then well, it's not a shock.
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