YOUR FACE HAS QUITE A FEW BUMPS
Questions for those of you that use the iPad for work. How good is Office (Word, Excel) these days? My company’s word templates have built in macros, will they run? Can I save to PDF?
Outlook, can I create meetings and forward them? Will it sync to show availability of others? How is email management such as moving emails to folders or searching?
I guess I’m trying to determine if I can leave the laptop behind for things like meetings, working at home for the day, etc.
The iPad is great for meetings. Very important to use a stylus so it looks like you’re taking notes rather than swiping around on instagram. It sucks for actual work.
Ok, here goes.
Office on iPad is a mixed bag.
There is no Macro support. Also you cannot create or modify document styles on iOS. If you are on Exchange 2013 or later (including o365) you can see free/busy info. We are on Exchange 2007 and I can’t. I’ve used it to create term papers for school and it works well for that.
I believe it can save to PDF, but if not, the Workflow app can do it.
I would not say based on your use case it’s a good work from home device. How do you connect to work? IOS doesn’t support things like access to network drives, etc. If your office is on OneDrive for business you might be able to access files that way.
Also WebEx on the iPad is a complete horror show.
In meetings I use OneNote/Office to take notes and follow along with documents people have emailed.
Last I checked, word on iOS didn’t support comments either, which was a major issue for me.
iPad Office can save to PDF or send an email with the file as a PDF attachment.
I don’t offhand see a way to create templates and poking around I ran into a 2014 post saying that at least at that point it couldn’t be done.
I did manage to use an existing custom template I made on the PC by dragging it into one of my OneDrive folders and opening it up on the iPad. That seems to work okay. It created a new document using the template.
In addition to OneDrive can access a pretty broad range of 3rd party network sharing systems including DropBox, Box, and another 10 I’ve never heard of (kiteworks, LEAP, Egnyte, NetDocuments …)
It also give you the ability to connect to a “Sharepoint Location” which looks like it’s some sort of Microsoft Enterprise solution allowing businesses to setup internal document sharing.
Disclaimer: I’ve literally only used iOS Office for less than 2 weeks, so I can’t give it a very thorough evaluation. So far it seems to work okay for light editing of documents, when I don’t want to bother going to either my desktop or laptop. It also works well for letting me open up a document for quick review.
It can do comments now. Just tested with one of my documents. It shows comments created from a regular computer and can create it’s own comments which show up when the document is opened on my desktop computer.
Good to know, thanks. When I was doing significant work on my iPad, that was a vital feature (and still would be).
Thanks all. I found this interesting list of features availability by version of Word.
Can I assume that if I round trip a word file from PC to iPad then back, that the macros and templates will survive, even if they don’t run on the iPad?
This is how I use my iPad Pro except I use Good Notes 4 instead of OneNote. I was getting palm artifacts with OneNote in draw mode and I get no artifacts in Good Notes.
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The only viable way I’ve found to use an iPad for work: Jump Remote Desktop + Citrix mouse + Windows PC or Mac turned on back at the office.
So i played with a 10.whatever one this weekend and… 120mhz scrolling is nice. Not sure if it’s “spend $800” nice, but it’s at least a bit tempting.
Hopefully adaptive refresh comes to the entire line, and is adopted on android devices too. PCs have it, consoles are getting it, mobile should have it also.
Just read rumors that the iPhone 8 may cost from $1200 - $1500. For a phone. Yikes!
I’d say the chances of that are about as far above zero as we’ve been able to cool hydrogen. I mean, maybe you could buy some super high storage version of it that would cost $1,200. But the baseline model? Not a chance.