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Microsoft launches Office for iPad

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221–230 of 284 posts

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 80 year old grandmother actively uses VMware on her windows 8 machine, for real not making this up. And that's the problem with anecdotes they tend to be way more interesting than the real data.

What does she use VMware for?

she has been an avid user of

PC Gourmet (Big Blue Disk 39)

since the eighties. I have never been able to extract the recipes easily and she has been using it pretty much constantly for 20+ years so there are too many to do by hand. It worked ok in xp but won't run since windows 7/8 so ... vmware

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#222
post #91

I'm wondering what would happen if, without paying for the office 365 subscription, I try to edit a document stored in the cloud. Will it open a Safari tab with the free office.com online Word/Excel/Powerpoint ? In other words : Is there an "Open with Word Online" button for non office 365 subscribers?

full disclosure: I work for Microsoft on the Office Online team

I do not believe that feature is in Office for iPad and you should be able to point your browser to OneDrive.com/office.com to get to your documents using Word/Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote Online in the meantime.

This is a really interesting idea though so I'll bring it up with the team, thanks!

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#223
post #203

$119 (in Australia, at least) is too much for me to try editing capabilities. How about you keep the price but only prevent me from saving? I need to know how it feels editing the documents before I commit to such price.

The Office 365 website offers a free months trial.

Ok, but it may be completely different from using the actual app.

For example, GMail app is way slower and irresponsive in the iPad than accessing directly from gmail.com in Safari.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#224
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that it's a good strategy for Microsoft to make its software run on other platforms. This isn't the 1990s anymore where Windows is the dominant platform. It's not even the early 2000's with the "I'm a Mac vs. I'm a PC" meme. Now there are multiple popular platforms (at least in the consumer market), none with clear dominance, and meanwhile Microsoft's software only works on their own platform. They have to co…

This isn't the 1990s anymore where Windows is the dominant platform. It's always easy to see who's in the bubble.

rodgerd, this comment really annoys me. It comes across so smug and, IMO, so wrong.

Windows is not the dominant computing platform, because PCs are not the dominant computing platform. Smartphones have been outselling PCs since 2011 – not even considering tablets. Windows is obviously still the dominant PC OS, but unlike the 1990's, that doesn't make it the dominant platform.

This is an article about Microsoft releasing Office for smartphone and tablet OSes. To ignore them from your evaluation of the "dominant platform" seems foolish.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#225
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because market share is a meaningless measure.

Nope its actually a totally real and meaningful measure. it measures how much of the market market -> all the people encompasses your share share -> using your stuff Apple has shown time and again that it isn't a good measure of Profitability, but your statement seemed to imply a more general connotation that I can't help with disagree with.

Except that it doesn't measure the actual using at all; I seem to recall there being rather more interesting stats than just vanilla "market share" in the iOS vs Android comparison that show that while more people have Android devices, more people with iOS are spending more on, and using more Apps.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#227
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a limited way. Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, and Communicator (i/o Lync) are available for Mac, but they are not even close to the Windows versions in terms of feature parity. VBA support has been on-and-off. Access, Infopath, and Publisher are not available at all. They're written in Cocoa and on a different release cycle. There is no Office for Mac 2013, current version is 2011.

Mac Office has often surpassed Win Office in many ways; in usability for example. It is at least a different product, not better or worse.

"It is at least a different product, not better or worse."

The very fact that it's different makes it worse for me. I can use Excel 2010 for Windows without thinking about the tool. Small differences like startup behaviour, position of things on the ribbon, and keyboard shortcut force me to think about how to use Excel for Mac, rather than focusing on the task at hand.

Some, but not all, of this is down to differences in the platform and platform-specific design conventions.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#229
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's meaningless because the 'market' of which share is measured is an arbitrary classification.

How so ? What market do you propose to measure then ?

How so? Because these so called 'markets' of which share is measured are not markets at all. They are simply groups of products that analysts have decided to add together.

Re: Microsoft launches Office for iPad

#230
post #128
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# and F# are great languages, but there are a lot of utterly terrible things in the .NET framework that need to be maintained... I don't envy Miguel in supporting all Microsoft's various false-start libraries.

I suppose a fringe benefit of open-sourcing .NET would be an eventual reduction in this phenomenon. I mean, it doesn't really even make sense to have a closed-source application programming language in this day and age, where the community building and maintaining it is entirely employed by a single company. It just isn't efficient enough, the maintenance is intractable, and you end up with false starts because the w…

I suppose a fringe benefit of open-sourcing .NET would be an eventual reduction in this phenomenon.

Why do you think that would be the case?

When I think "open-source" I think "fragmented, lots of utterly terrible things, lots of half-finished false-starts".

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