When it comes to benchmark tests designed to simulate real-world app usage and graphics performance, the iPad Air and iPad Pro each excel in different areas. During Geekbench 5's test that's meant. Apple is eager to promote the iPad Pro as a serious computing device, and few apps demonstrate this better than Excel. In recent years, the famous spreadsheet program has seen significant.
If you frequently use Excel to create and edit spreadsheets on your Mac, you may want to access the same files while you’re on the go with just your iPad. Although Microsoft hasn’t released an iOS version of Excel, you can still work with Excel files on your iPad if you’re willing to accept a few compromises.
View Excel files on your iPad
If you only need to view Microsoft Excel documents, you’re in luck; Apple’s iOS can display them natively. All you need to do is get the spreadsheets onto your iPad—for example, email them to yourself as attachments, or use an app designed for transferring and viewing documents, such as Avatron Software’s $10 Air Sharing, Good.iWare’s $5 GoodReader for iPad (), or Readdle’s $5 ReaddleDocs for iPad ().
Editing your spreadsheets is not quite as simple. Although several apps and methods exist, none of them has all of Excel’s features. As a result, you’ll face one or more limitations—for example, loss of formatting or a poor touch-screen interface.
Edit Excel spreadsheets with Apple’s Numbers
One natural option for editing Excel spreadsheets is Apple’s Numbers ($10, ). It can import and export documents in Microsoft Excel format, and offers a powerful and easy-to-use environment for creating and editing files.
As long as you’re running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, using the latest version of Numbers for Mac and iOS, and have an Apple iCloud account, transferring documents between a given app on your Mac(s) and iOS device(s) is simple thanks to iCloud’s Documents in the Cloud feature.
Unfortunately, when you import a file in Microsoft Excel format (.xls or .xlsx) or export a Numbers file in an Excel format, you permanently lose essential formatting, tracked changes, comments, and other file attributes. So, if you’re content to keep your Excel spreadsheets in Numbers format once they’re imported—or give up any unsupported formatting—Numbers is arguably your best choice. But if maintaining fidelity with original formatting is your top priority when working with Excel documents on an iPad, you’ll want to look for another solution.
Edit Excel spreadsheets with Google Docs
Another approach is to rely on Google Docs, Google’s free Web-based office suite. Many businesses have standardized on Google Docs because it’s a convenient platform that requires no software beyond a Web browser, provides automatic backups and versioning, and makes sharing files with co-workers easy. All of this would seem to be a natural fit for the iPad, too.
Unfortunately, it isn’t a perfect fit. Although you can upload nearly any format file to Google Docs, if you want to edit spreadsheets online, you must let Google Docs convert them to its own format; as with Numbers, that may entail a considerable loss of formatting—and in cases where formulas differ between Excel and Google Spreadsheets, calculations may change.
Moreover, editing spreadsheets once they’re converted is problematic. With the mobile version of Google Spreadsheets (the default view on an iPad), you can do only the basics—edit cell values, add rows, and change sort orders. But if you switch to the desktop-style Spreadsheet View, you’ll find many of the controls inoperable, and even something as ordinary as selecting a range of cells might prove impossible. The latest version of Nikita Lutsenko’s $4 GoDocs, which offers editing and offline storage of Google Docs, lets you switch more easily between Google’s mobile and desktop views, but because it uses a built-in browser for editing spreadsheets online, its editing capabilities have the same limitations as in Safari.
Try editing with an Office suite
Other good options exist, however, even for Excel spreadsheets uploaded to your Google Docs account. You can still have an excellent editing experience on an iPad by using the native editors built into any of numerous other iPad apps that connect directly to Google Docs.
All five of the following all-in-one office suites for the iPad include word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation tools. They all can edit documents from Microsoft Excel and offer direct ties to a variety of cloud-based services, including Google Docs and Dropbox, making it easy to get documents in and out. The spreadsheet components of all the apps let you adjust font, size, style, text color, background color, alignment, and number formatting. They include a wide range of built-in functions and let you resize columns and rows (although not always in the most obvious way). But there also are significant differences between them.
Documents To Go Premium DataViz’s $17 Documents To Go Premium () is an all-in-one office suite for the iPad, with word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation tools. It has a functional but unexceptional spreadsheet capability, and it doesn’t take good advantage of the iPad’s touch interface. The app does allow you to search and sort your data, but can’t display charts, has no support for cell borders, and can’t merge cells. (However, any of those attributes present when the file was imported are preserved when you save the file.) Although it lets you import a spreadsheet that contains unsupported functions, it makes the file read-only.
Office² HD Byte Squared’s $8 Office² HD () has a broad set of spreadsheet features as well as a nicely designed interface. It supports sorting your data, and unlike Documents to Go Premium, also lets you merge cells, change borders, and search. But there’s one potentially serious drawback: Although most imported document features are preserved when you save an imported worksheet, charts are not. Note that the developer also sells the $6 Sheet² HD, an app with the same spreadsheet features but without word processing or presentations.
Polaris Office Infraware’s $13 Polaris Office makes good use of the iPad’s touch interface, has a respectable chart-creation tool, and also supports adding images and adjusting cell borders. It offers find and replace, merging, sorting, filtering, and a helpful Freeze Frame feature, which locks header columns and rows so you can scroll within a spreadsheet without losing your place.
Quickoffice Pro HD Quickoffice’s $20 Quickoffice Pro HD () offers easier selection and editing than most other apps covered here and includes a find-and-replace feature. Charts from imported spreadsheets, although not displayed in the app, are preserved when you save. Other than that, though, Quickoffice has a fairly basic feature set—for example, no cell borders, merging, or sorting.
Smart Office 2 Picsel’s $10 Smart Office 2 has a somewhat awkward user interface even for simple actions such as inserting functions, and its performance can be sluggish. Like Quickoffice Pro HD, it lacks support for cell borders, merging, and sorting. It has a find feature but no replace. On the other hand, even though it can’t add new charts, it does display charts from imported spreadsheets—and even updates them correctly as the data changes.
Opt for a spreadsheet-only editing
Beyond these all-in-one office apps, I should mention one other iPad apps that edits spreadsheets specifically (but not Word or PowerPoint documents). Mariner Software’s $6 Mariner Calc for iPad has a solid array of spreadsheet features and can read and write Excel files (.xls only, not .xlsx). However, it doesn’t connect to cloud-based services for transferring files or preserve all formatting when saving imported spreadsheets.
Pick your tool
If you need to edit Excel spreads documents on an iPad, first consider whether they’ll need to travel back and forth between your iPad and Microsoft Excel. If not, Apple’s Numbers will likely give you the best experience. When you do need to preserve full Office compatibility, Office HD is your best choice, as long as you don’t need to import documents containing charts. If creating (or preserving) charts is essential, I’d give the nod to Polaris Office. There’s still one more option to consider, though, running the Windows version of Office on your iPad remotely.
Senior contributor Joe Kissell is the senior editor of TidBits and the author of the ebook Take Control of Working with Your iPad, Second Edition (TidBITS Publishing, 2011).
Microsoft has announced that Office for iPad apps will gain the ability to use add-in apps like its desktop and web Office components. The first one out the gate is Excel for iPad. Note that this is the same app that can be used on the iPhone too. However, the add-ins are only available when used on an iPad. Let’s take a short tour of the add-in installation process, and some of the strengths and weaknesses I found when testing out this new capability on my iPad.
First, a brief history: Add-ins first appeared for Microsoft Office 2013 on the desktop and on the Web (Apps for Office) in 2012. The free and paid add-in apps can be found either in Microsoft’s Web store from within the Office client itself. If you are wondering where the free-to-use Office Web apps are, you can find them (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote) in Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage service.
Note that you do not need to have Office installed on a desktop or notebook in order to use Excel for iPad. You will, however, want a Microsoft account. If you use one of Microsoft’s cloud service like Outlook.com or OneDrive, you are all set to go on this front. The latest round of updates for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint brought support for storing documents on DropBox and Apple’s iCloud. However, you plan to use the Office web apps as I do here, get a Microsoft account.
The new “Add-ins” feature is in Excel’s “Insert” tab. Tapping it brings up a few recommendations.
Tap the “See All” menu option see other apps that may interest you. The first thing I noticed is that the initial set of apps shown in the Apps for Excel Office web store is very different from the set of apps you first see from within the Excel iPad app. This is not necessarily a bad thing, however. Most of the apps I saw from with Excel on the iPad were add-ins from Microsoft or Microsoft Research. This may provide some level of comfort if it is your first time installing and using an add-in with Excel.
Tap the add-in you want to install from the Office Add-ins window. I started with the free Bing Maps add-in.
The last step before you can actually use the add-in with Excel is to read through what the add-in does with your data and, if its potential actions are acceptable, to tap the “Trust it” button.
I have to confess something here: I cheated. It turned out that the Bing Maps add-in works with Excel on an iPad. However, like many applications that were designed for use with a mouse or touchpad, its user experience loses something in translation. And, here is where it is very useful to have a Microsoft account and use its OneDrive cloud storage.
I had problems with the inserted overlapping the spreadsheet data and, seemingly, being able to move or delete the map object. This, however, is because Bing Maps is a mouse-centric add-in that wants you to “hover” a mouse pointer over specific edge segments in order to manipulate the map object. This problem was resolved by closing the spreadsheet on the iPad (Excel locks files stored in OneDrive), bringing up OneDrive in a desktop web browser and then working with the Bing Map object using the Excel Web app to move the map and select data from the spreadsheet. Closing the Excel Web app and opening the spreadsheet on the iPad let me work with the add-in by, for example, tapping a named location on the map to display the underlying spreadsheet data.
Two questions are answered here:
- Is it possible to run more than one Excel add-in?
- Are there add-ins that do not need a mouse?
Excel For Ipad
I selected the Wikipedia add-in from Microsoft itself to answer these two questions.
You can see in this screenshot that both the Bing Maps and Wikipedia add-ins are displayed and working at the same time in Excel on the iPad. And, tapping on one of the names of the western state capital city names in the spreadsheet taps into Wikipedia as you expect.
Issues
I found a couple of issues with the new Excel add-in feature. The first and biggest problem is that the Excel app crashed frequently during tasks such as installing and add-in or simply working with a spreadsheet. No data was lost because of the crashes. But, they were annoying and slowed the testing process. The second issue is a common one in the app world: Add-in discovery. Although there only appears to be a few dozen add-ins for Excel, there should be a faster and easier way to explore and discover useful add-ins. The third issue was the general slowness of accessing data from OneDrive on a relatively fast Internet connection (download speed ranging from 35 to 50 Mbps). You may, however, choose to use local storage on the iPad or other cloud service (iCloud or Dropbox).
Issues aside, add-ins for Excel today, and for Word and PowerPoint in the near future, brings its use on the iPad one more step up the “serious scale.” I’ve found the iPad to be a productivity machine since its launch in 2010. But, others were not convinced. Add-ins for Microsoft Office on the iPad may be one of the features that convinces them the iPad is for serious work.
Develop Your Own Add-ins
Microsoft Office For Ipad Pro
If the add-ins in the Microsoft Store seem to limited to you, take a look at Microsoft’s Overview of apps for Office. Add-ins are Web applications built using HTML5, XML, CSS3, JavaScript, and REST APIs. You can write you own add-ins using just a text editor, although there are much more sophisticated tools available.