Microsoft has been aggressively marketing document fidelity as an advantage of Office for iPad, but you get it only for simple to moderately complex documents using the same fonts. (If a document is open and you lose your connection, Office is smart enough to save a temporary local copy.) In Office, you expressly move a file to your iPad's local storage to work on it while, say, in flight. Office for iPad lacks a key advantage of iWork: automatic syncing of documents across all your devices, so they're available offline.

Office for iPad is less capable than Office for Mac, but it's roughly equal to Apple's iWork suite, which is perfectly adequate for most productivity work. Still, for most users, Office for Mac provides the capabilities they need - even if you feel dissed in the process. Office 2011 for Mac can't use all the fonts on your Mac if you have a large library installed, such as the full Adobe Font Folio - it simply stops loading fonts when it's 'full,' making them inaccessible to your documents. SharePoint access is limited to essentially a Web-based, read-only mode across Office for Mac, which ironically encourages users to set up informal Dropbox or Box accounts. For example, Excel for Mac supports only a subset of macros, so accounting departments must use Windows PCs. Mac users typically wait several years before a new Windows version is ported to OS X, creating a compatibility gap.įeature compatibility is usually compromised along the way. Its performance is always noticeably sluggish on the Mac, though that's not true of software from other cross-platform companies, from Adobe to AutoDesk. It's been sad to see Microsoft continually make the Mac version of Office inferior to the Windows version. Office on the iPad and OS X: A decent experience Microsoft has had Mac versions of its suite for decades - Excel and PowerPoint got their start on the Mac, in fact. Or could they? I set out to find out how Office 365 actually works in OS X, iOS, and Android. Still, for the first time, people who don't use Windows or don't use Windows exclusively could work as equal partners in an Office-dominated environment - which is most companies. But there was a price: You must have an Office 365 subscription, and your files are essentially locked into Microsoft's own storage services (OneDrive and SharePoint). Finally, in February, Microsoft finally did so - and Microsoft produced a solid set of apps in the form of Office for iPad.

For years, the world has been begging Microsoft to release its Office suite for the iPad.

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