A year later, after the iWork package from Apple became free for new devices of the “apple” company, Microsoft abolished the paid subscription for Office 365. From now on, in mobile versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint for iOS, you can view not only free, but also edit documents. In honor of such a joyful event, I decided to install the famous Microsoft applications on my iPad, compare them with the analogues from Apple, choose for yourself the attracted office package and share with you your thoughts.
I think the first criterion by which I will identify the applications that suit me will be the space. My iPad 4 at 32 GB is almost beaten to the eyeballs, so a more “easy” set can immediately become a leader. However, nobody was able to become a favorite: both office packages occupy about 1.3 GB.
After a little warm-up, it’s time to compare the applications of the forehead to the forehead. To begin with, I will run text editors, then solutions for working with spreadsheets, and at the very end – programs for creating presentations.
Word and Pages
The first thing that catches your eye is the large number of ready-made templates in Pages. Their number exceeds that in Word almost 3 times! Of course, their diversity is unlikely to bring much practical benefit, but the very fact that there are a lot of them is pleasant.
The functions that both the editor and the other have are absolutely comparable. Only some functions, such as inserting breaks, tracking changes and additional styles and shadows, are available with a premium subscription to Office 365. If you consider that these are not key features for which I would like to pay, the differences between Word and Pages in this plan also does not exist. The only important thing is how this is presented to the user. And here, in my opinion, the product from Microsoft is bigger than its competitor. Absolutely all the management of the editor is rendered on the top panel and grouped by tabs.
In Pages, in contrast, some of the tools intended to change the properties of the text are located strictly above the keyboard. The menu for inserting diagrams, tables, headers and lists is hidden behind anonymous buttons. Perhaps, from the point of view of the iWork application interface designer, this type of button layout is the best possible, but it seems to me that this is not cool at all.
Some text parameters are completely duplicated both on the bottom panel and on the top. After working in Word, the Pages interface seems to me very poor and empty, but it’s already a matter of taste. I, as a Windows user with many years of experience, are likely just used to the logic and structure of Microsoft applications.
As a student in the physics and mathematics faculty, I often came across documents that contained simply a mad amount of complicated formulas. My negligence when copying cheats in Pages on iPhone not so long ago made it difficult for me to pass the exams. The text editor from Apple simply could not read the formulas I needed. Therefore, if you have to deal with such specific characters, Word is the number one application.
Excel and Numbers
Programs for working with spreadsheets I use much less often than usual text editors. But such a need can arise suddenly, so for me it is important to have an application ready to display, edit and forward the document correctly. With the number of templates and the structure of the interface programs MS Office and iWork, we have already figured out. Ordinary files with simple graphs, diagrams and formulas are displayed identically in both applications.
For “combat” comparison, I selected a document for calculating the statistics of games in bookmakers, which allows to determine the probabilities, coefficients and many other parameters. The work of Excel and Numbers with this file, containing many formulas, did not cause me absolutely no complaints. Both programs behave absolutely correctly, offering the user a special convenient keyboard for entering data into cells. Undoubtedly, Excel is a more powerful application, but I personally do not need this variety of functions, so in this choice the main influence can be rendered only by personal preferences.
But one thing that’s playing on the side of the product from Microsoft, I still found it. It’s about scrolling through the pages of a document. The panel with row numbers and letters of Excel columns automatically “snaps” to the cells when scrolling, which allows you not to bother much when moving over the worksheet. This can be compared with an auto-door driver in a car. So here, the work area is clearly fixed without additional user effort. In Numbers, this function is simply missing.
PowerPoint and Keynote
If I liked the variety of tabs and buttons in Word, the PowerPoint interface made me tense. It’s not that everything here is radically different, but that the process of writing texts is very different from creating presentation files. In Keynote, I intuitively find the button for adding a new slide. Logically, this button is located at the bottom of the panel with thumbnails of the slides, because they are located from the top down from the first to the last. In PowerPoint, the coveted button is strictly in the opposite place. Maybe this can be used, but why force yourself to use what initially seems uncomfortable?
Another advantage of Keynote is the use of the iOS device as a remote control to control the slide show on another Apple mobile device or on a Mac.
In the rest, both programs offer similar variations of templates, the ability to add sounds, images and videos, sets of transitions and animations.
What to choose?
It is difficult to sum up, when all three applications from each package received different estimates. Leader for working with ordinary documents, I would call Word. Between Numbers and Excel, I did not notice much of a difference, except for the pleasant scrolling of the Microsoft-designed workspace. When comparing Keynote and PowerPoint, I got the impression that working with the “apple” program is easier and faster.
Each program can synchronize with the help of cloud technologies. For iWork, this is iCloud, and for Office 365, it’s a Microsoft account and a Dropbox store.
It seems that I will choose the program package from Microsoft. Despite the fact that I really enjoyed using Keynote, I’ll have to use it again at best in a year. It is much more important to have a good text editor, but here the advantage is not on the side of iWork. The familiar organization of the interface, borrowed from the PC version, the location of all the tools on the tabs on one panel, the correct display of formulas – all this I had to taste.
And what office applications do you use on your iOS devices and do you use it at all? Comment and share your experience!
