By Geoffrey A. Fowler
Everyone can now get Microsoft Office for free on their iPhones,
iPads and (soon) Android tablets .
Full-featured Word, Excel and PowerPoint finally on the devices
we spend more and more time using--and for free? If it was 2011,
that would be incredible news.
But at the end of 2014, trying out these new apps on a phone and
tablet just underscores how out of sync the king of productivity
software has become with the way we use the Internet. Now that we
can edit files across several devices, it exacerbates long-standing
weaknesses in Office's online capabilities to keep track of our
work and collaborate with others. Microsoft Office isn't moving as
fast as competitors like Google Docs into a world where we expect
to start writing a file on a PC, pick it up via phone while on the
train, then finish it at home with a tablet.
What Microsoft gets right in the new Office apps is a
no-compromises approach to viewing and manipulating files. Like
with Word, Excel and PowerPoint for the iPad that came out earlier
this year, Office for iPhone and Android tablets keeps the fidelity
of documents and spreadsheets made elsewhere. To make letter-sized
Word documents legible on small screen, the app has a button at the
top that re-flows their contents at reader-friendly font size,
without altering the document itself.
Across all the apps, finger-friendly buttons and menus control
most of the functions you really need: formatting, word counting
and more. The new Android app--which isn't yet available for phones
and remains a limited, non-collaborative "preview" on tablets
through early 2015--is similar to the iPad with a few menus and
buttons relocated. On the iPhone, Office's famous (or infamous)
horizontal "ribbon" of editing options has moved to the bottom of
the screen. It feels like an in-app keyboard replacement that gives
you powerful controls for inserting pictures, formatting or
reviewing your document. Still missing, however, is a
thesaurus.
While generally intuitive, these Office apps still have a few
bugs. For instance, my apps listed two copies of every file I saved
to Microsoft's OneDrive cloud service, an issue the company says it
is aware of and hopes to fix on a future release.
All the apps themselves are free, but for many people this isn't
actually going to be a good way to get Office for free. You still
need to pay to use it on a PC, or else you're stuck with the free
Web-based Office Online service. Not only is the Web version very
watered-down, it couldn't handle a graphics-rich Word document I
made with a Microsoft template.
And the free apps reserve certain capabilities for paying
customers, but the list is curious: Free users can make Word
documents in portrait, but they can't switch to landscape. Free
users can't track changes. And, in a move to protect the more
lucrative enterprise side of Office, free users can't open and save
documents shared from someone using OneDrive for Business.
Being kept from those premiums is an acceptable trade-off for a
mostly usable free Office suite. But the frustration I faced trying
to edit Office files across multiple devices and with multiple
people is not forgivable.
The current champion of real-time collaboration is the free
Google productivity suite, including Docs, Sheets and Slides. Mind
you, these apps aren't as pretty or as capable as Office, but they
do one thing extremely well: Every device and every person with a
document open sees the latest version at all times, so long as
they're connected to the Internet. Working together in real time is
a breeze.
Office falters because it takes a more old-school approach to
file management. Its apps auto-save changes to your documents into
OneDrive or Dropbox every once in a while, but not instantly. Any
other device or person that wants to work on the same document has
to click "save and refresh" to make sure they've got the latest
updates.
In my tests, this system too often failed to sync up the latest
version of my files. For example, one time I was taking notes on my
iPad, but then it ran out of battery. I expected I could pick up my
iPhone and just keep going, but discovered OneDrive didn't have the
latest version of my document. (A Microsoft spokesman said this
could have happened because the iPad app auto-saves less often when
the iPad's battery gets low. I understand, it's an effort to save
power, but that's exactly when I need auto-saving the most!)
Office's syncing also let me down while writing this review on a
PC using the latest Office 365. I thought it was auto-saving all my
changes so I could continue working on the train ride home. But
when I pulled up the doc on my iPhone, I only found a much earlier
version. I had to run back up to my PC, then click "Save and
Refresh."
Collaborating on the document with my editor was also a
many-click process. I clicked share, but that just sent him an
email--my file didn't show up in his OneDrive, where he was looking
for it. And when he made changes with Office Online, Word for
iPhone would pop up a screen that warned "AutoSave is Disabled." To
see his changes, I had to tap "OK, " then "More," then "Save and
Refresh."
(Android users, be warned: The current preview release of the
Android tablet app doesn't yet support co-authoring at all, so if
you try it out, don't expect to keep things in sync.)
Microsoft's response to all my questions about syncing and
collaboration is that the company is working on it.
"Our initial release focused on delivering file syncing and
co-authoring functional parity with desktop Office. Now that we
have delivered on that baseline (and hundreds of other end-user
features), we will be focusing on the next wave of file
improvements," wrote a spokeswoman.
I'm glad that Microsoft now recognizes that we live in a world
where we do serious work across many devices beyond the PC. But its
take on how we use the Internet still feels stuck in the PC
era.
Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com and on
Twitter at @GeoffreyFowler.
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