Review: Microsoft Word for iPad

I’ve been using Word for iPad almost every day since it was released two weeks ago.  I really like it, and I’ve now used it enough to write a full review.  (I wrote a first look post while I was at ABA TECHSHOW two weeks ago.)  As a litigator who works with Microsoft Word documents throughout the day, it is incredibly useful to have a sophisticated and full-featured version of Word on my iPad.  Word for iPad has easily become one of the most important and useful apps on my iPad, and I suspect that many other attorneys will feel the same way.  The app has some limitations, and a few of them are big and I hope that they are addressed in a future update, but for 1.0 version of an app, Microsoft really did a great job. 

And when I say “Microsoft” I’m specifically talking about the Mac folks at Microsoft, a group that for years was called the MacBU (Macintosh Business Unit), and just recently changed its name to Apex (Apple Productivity Experiences) to reflect that they are working on more than just Mac software.  Earlier this week, the Office for iPad team answered questions in a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) session, and it was revealed that the folks at Microsoft who designed the Office iPad apps are the same folks who create Office apps for Mac.

Indeed, the Word for iPad team revealed that they started with the Mac version of Word to create Word for iPad, and Erik Schwiebert, the principal software designer in the MacBU/Apex, said that the work that Microsoft has been doing on Office for iPad is actually going to also be used for an upcoming version of Office for Mac:

The code for Office for iPad and Office for Mac is shared, as the development platforms for both are very similar. 🙂 The iPad work required us to create an all-new UI and to redesign the interface between UI and the internal logic. That work actually helps us with de-Carbonizing Office for the Mac, instead of delaying or hindering it. We’re able to create new Cocoa UI on the Mac and tie it into the new logic interface now.

It must be interesting to be a person employed by Microsoft who spends all of his or her time working on Mac, iPad and iPhone apps.  Sort of like the folks who work at Apple on the iTunes for Windows software.  But based on this short, fun video prepared for the Reddit session, The Mac BU looks like a good group.

(Trivia for long-time Mac users:  many folks believe that Word 5.1 for Mac, released in 1992, was the best-ever version of Word on a Mac.  A Microsoft employee named “Rick” said in Reddit yesterday that he been working on Word for Mac since version 5.0 and now he is working on Word for iPad.  That’s quite a resume over a long stretch of time.  I’m guessing it is Rick Schaut, who wrote this interesting post about some of the early versions of Word for Mac.  UPDATE:  Yep, it is him.)

So now that we know who made Word for iPad, let’s talk about the app itself.

Importing Documents

Unless you are starting a new document from scratch, the first step is to get a Word document into the Word for iPad app.  Importing documents into Word for iPad from another app is fairly easy because you can use the standard iOS Open in… function.  For example, if someone emails you a Word document, you can simply hold your finger down on the Word document icon for a second or two, then when the Open in… selection appears you can simply select Word for iPad.

What if your document is instead located on a cloud service, such as Dropbox?  Word for iPad doesn’t have built-in support for any cloud services other than Microsoft’s own OneDrive service, but since all of those cloud services have their own apps, this is only a minor limitation.  For example, to open a document in a Dropbox folder, just use the Dropbox app to select the document and then Open in… Word for iPad.

And as noted, Word for iPad has built-in support for OneDrive, so if a document is located in one of your OneDrive folders, you can easily open it from within Word for iPad.  The app also has built-in support for documents stored on SharePoint 2010 or higher.

Basic Reviewing and Editing

The main thing that you want to do with a Word document on an iPad is likely to be (1) read it and (2) perhaps make some minor edits.  For these basic functions, Word for iPad works well, and is overall better than any other iPad app.

Viewing documents works very well because Word for iPad preserves all of the original document formatting.  This is no accident.  As Erik Schwiebert of the Mac BU noted in the Reddit session, Microsoft uses the same text layout engine in Word for iPad that is used in Word for Windows and Word for Mac.  (Another developer also said the same thing.) 

The only other iPad app I’ve ever used that also does an excellent job preserving Word document formatting is Reader 7.  My only real complaint with viewing a document in Word for iPad is that you cannot view a document full screen, which is a nice feature if all you want to do is read a document.  For this reason, I recommend that all attorneys also keep a copy of the excellent (and free) Reader 7 app on their iPads, which has a full screen view.

Basic editing of documents also works very well, which is no surprise because this is the one function that the otherwise limited Microsoft Office Mobile for iPhone also does well.  So if someone sends you a brief and you want to add a sentence, delete a paragraph, move something from one section to another, Word for iPad works great.  You can edit the document without worrying about messing up the document properties so that it will look wrong when sent back to a computer.  And unlike the iPhone app, in Word for iPad you can also view, edit and add footnotes, a critical feature for litigators.

Typing on the on-screen keyboard works the same as most any other app.  This means, for example, that in addition to typing on the virtual keyboard, you can tap the microphone button (next to the space bar) to dictate, which Siri does quite well.  I often find that using Siri to take dictation is much faster than me tapping on a virtual keyboard when I just want to add a sentence or two.  Note that there are currently a few dictation bugs in Word for iPad — for example, you cannot dictate in a footnote — but Microsoft is aware of the issue and is working on a fix.

For more intensive editing, I recommend using an external keyboard.  I use the Apple Wireless Keyboard, but I know that some people prefer a smaller keyboard that also works as an iPad cover such as the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover.  With an external keyboard you can type much faster, plus you can use standard keyboard shortcuts to undo, repeat, cut, copy, paste, select all, and you can also quickly apply bold, italics or underline formatting.  Word also supports standard keyboard navigation shortcuts such as Shift-Option-Right Arrow to quickly select text one word at a time.  Click here for a full list of Word for iPad keyboard shortcuts.

Buttons and Toolbars

Word for iPad has a few buttons at the top left and right and toolbars in the middle.

The buttons on the left let you return to your file list, edit document properties and duplicate the document (i.e. “Save as…”), undo and redo.  The buttons at the right let you do a full text search, and if you tap the magnifying glass and then tap the gear icon, you can do a Find and Replace.  The button at the far right lets you share a document … more on that below.

There are five ribbons.  The Home ribbon includes all of your basic formatting such font, bold, text color and highlighting, text justification, line spacing, bullets, numbered paragraphs, etc.  The first button on the Home ribbon is for Styles, and I discuss that in more detail below.  The Insert ribbon lets you add page breaks, tables, pictures, shapes, a text box, a hyperlink, and a footnote.  The Layout ribbon lets you change the page layout and margins, including page numbers.  The Review ribbon lets you track changes, and I have more on that below.  Finally, the View ribbon turns spell-checking as you type on or off, turns a ruler on or off, and gives you a Word count (which includes Page count and character count).

Styles

I always use the Styles function in Word on my PC and Mac and I recommend that others do too.  For example, I have pre-defined styles for Text in a brief (indent paragraph, double-space, etc.), Block Quotes (indented on both sides, single space), the text that comes after a block quote when I am still in the same paragraph that I call Post Quote (same as the Text style but not indented), etc. 

The current version of Word for iPad has only limited support for styles.  First, you cannot create styles in Word for iPad.  So in a new document, if you want to indent, change line spacing, change the font, etc., you will need to do that manually.

Second, if you open a document that you created on your computer using styles, Word for iPad will recognize those styles and will correctly display the document formatting.  But you cannot easily use those styles in your document to apply them to more text.  While there is a Styles button in Word for iPad, it comes pre-loaded with 15 styles that are always there and cannot be changed (and which are mostly useless for legal documents).  The Styles button will not show you the styles that exist in your document, so you cannot use that menu to select a style that exists in the document and apply it to different text.

However, Microsoft did provide one partial work-around.  If you copy text in Word for iPad to which you had applied a style on your computer, and then you select a different string of text, Word for iPad includes an option to Paste Format.  That option will apply all of the formatting, including the style name, to the new text.  So for example, if you have a Block Quote style that you like to use, and you are editing a document that already has that style in use, you are in luck.  Just copy that paragraph and then paste the formatting to a different paragraph. 

Unfortunately, if the style that you want is present in the document but not currently being used, you can’t use it.  My hope is that better support for styles is a feature that Microsoft is working on for a future update.

Track Changes

One of the very best parts of Microsoft Word for iPad is the track changes feature.  I say this because most attorneys are unlikely to write a brief from scratch using Word on an iPad (although you could do so).  Instead, most attorneys will find Word for iPad most useful when they are using an iPad away from the office and they just want to suggest some edits to a documents someone else created on a computer.

For the most part, track changes works great.  Just turn it on, and new text is underlined and deleted text is stricken. 

There is one quirk that I don’t quite understand.  When you make an edit, it shows up in one color.  You can then change what you just did for about a minute, but sometimes (and not all of the time) after a minute the color changes.  When this happens, if you want to alter your edit, it shows up as a redline to your redline.  I can’t think of any reason that anyone would want their edits to show up this way.  The only workaround that I have discovered is to go to your original edit, select it and tap the icon on the ribbon to reject your first edit (so that you go back to the original text), an then edit again as you now want it to read.  Although this workaround works, it seems silly that you have to do it in the first place.

Other Advanced Functions

It comes as no surprise that there are many other advanced functions supported by Word on the PC or Mac that are not supported on the iPad.  Other than the ones listed above, I really don’t miss them.

For example, while you can check spelling in Word for iPad, you cannot check grammar.  But grammar checking is a function that annoys me in Word on my Mac and PC, so I always keep it turned off on my computers.  I don’t miss it on the iPad.

Word for iPad supports footnotes but has only limited support for endnotes, captions (numbered labels for objects), citations (the bibliography function), and Table of Contents — namely, you can view them if they are already in a document, but you cannot add or update them.  Again, I don’t miss these features in Word for iPad, and I suspect that most attorneys who use Word for iPad will feel the same.

Word for iPad doesn’t support macros.  I stopped using macros in Word documents a very long time ago because they were sometimes used to spread Word viruses.  If you like to use macros in your Word documents, you can do so on your computer but not in Word for iPad.

Word for iPad also doesn’t support split windows.  I sometimes find split windows useful on my PC and Mac, but in light of the smaller size of the iPad screen, I can understand why this feature was omitted.  Having said that, if Microsoft were to add this feature in the future, I might find it useful, especially when in portrait orientation.

Exporting Documents

So now you have edited your document and you are ready to move it off of your iPad.  What are the choices?  Word for iPad sometimes feels like it has the Hotel California problem; you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.  Word for iPad has many limitations that make it more difficult than I would have expected to get a document out of the iPad.

First, you cannot print … yet.  Although this has resulted in some bad press, I don’t see this as a major limitation.  Although I do sometimes print from my iPad to an AirPrint printer, I don’t do this very often, and I don’t really miss it in Word for iPad.  Moreover, PC World is reporting that Microsoft will add this feature in a future update, and Microsoft Principal Group Manager Sangeeta Mudnal said in the Reddit this week:  “Print is a high demand feature that we intend to introduce in due course.”  [UPDATE 4/28/14:  Version 1.0.1 came out today, and it adds the ability to print.]

Second, Word for iPad doesn’t support the standard iOS export functions to Open in… another app or to share with another user using AirDrop.  The Open in… omission is a huge limitation, and is so obvious of an omission that I can only conclude that Microsoft deliberately chose not to support the feature, perhaps as a way to encourage users to use OneDrive.  My #1 feature request for Word for iPad is that Microsoft reconsider this decision and add the ability to open a document in another app.  This would let folks save to Dropbox (by opening in the Dropbox app), convert to PDF (by opening in any of the apps that convert Word files to PDF), add the document to an iPad-based folder (such as folder in GoodReader), etc.

So what can you do right now with a document?  First, you can save the document to the iPad itself.  This works fine if you don’t have a lot of documents, but there is no support for folders so you just have to work with a big long list of documents.  There is a Recent button that lists in order of use, so at least it isn’t too hard to find a document that you worked with recently.

Second, you can email the document itself, or a link to the document.  More on this in a moment.

Third, you can save the document to OneDrive.  Indeed, everyone who uses Office 365 has a OneDrive account, so by definition if you have the full version of Word for iPad, you have a OneDrive account.  But for me, saving confidential attorney-client documents and/or work product — such as the drafts of virtually every document that I work on — to OneDrive is not acceptable.  I’m sure that Microsoft has good intentions, as does Dropbox and other cloud storage services, but I would rather keep my confidential documents under my control, which means only storing the documents on devices that I or my law firm own unless there is sophisticated encryption.

Note that if you do save to OneDrive, you can then use the free OneDrive app to access the document, but the OneDrive app also doesn’t support the standard iOS functions so you cannot use the OneDrive app to open the document in another app.  [UPDATE:  I missed it at first, but now I see that you can do this in OneDrive; when the document is being shown on your screen, tap … in the bottom right corner and select Open in Another App.]  You can, also work with documents in your OneDrive with other apps, such as Documents to Go or GoodReader.

Note also that if you choose to email a link to someone instead of emailing them the actual document, it appears that Microsoft first uploads the document to OneDrive and then sends a link.  So if you want to avoid putting a confidential document on OneDrive, I recommend that you email the file itself and not a link.

Finally, I see that the Word for iPad app supports Microsoft SharePoint.  I know that you can open documents from a SharePoint location, and according to Priyanka Sinha, part of the PowerPoint for iPad team, “Office for iPad supports opening, editing, saving from [on-premise] SharePoint 2010+.”  I don’t use SharePoint, but if your law firm does, this is good news.

Of all of these options, email is the only one that will be useful for most attorneys, unless your office has on-premise SharePoint.  Indeed, if you want to edit a document and then send the revised draft to another attorney or your secretary, email is a great option.  So thank goodness Word for iPad includes the option to email the document because for many attorneys, this may be the only option that they really need.

If you instead want to open a document in another app, you can use the email function as a workaround.  Email the document to yourself, then open up that email, then hold your finger down on the attachment and you can then open up the document in another app — for example, open in Dropbox to save it there, open in another app that will convert to PDF, open in the Transporter app to save it to a folder on your Transporter, etc.

Stability

I rarely have problems with iPad apps crashing, but sometimes it happens, and it can be very annoying.  One of the things that I have always liked about Pages, the word processor for the iPad made by Apple, is that it is rock solid.  I have used it to take notes in day-long meetings and depositions many, many times and it has always worked perfectly and I have never lost even a line of text.

I’ve only been using Word for iPad for two weeks, and while the app has not crashed on me yet, UPDATE: SEE BELOW I’ll have to use it much longer to conclude that it is as stable as Pages.  However, I have had one occasion when I was using Word for iPad (and one occasion when I was using Excel for iPad) when I got a “Not enough memory” error.  I tapped OK and continued to use the apps without incident, but the error did make me nervous.

[UPDATE:  So just a few hours after this post went live, I had my first crash.  Thursday morning I was taking a deposition of a plaintiff.  An attorney for a co-defendant went first and asked questions and I was taking notes of the questions and answers on my iPad.  I usually use Pages for this, but today I decided to use Word for iPad with an external keyboard.  I was also frequently switching between Word and other apps on my iPad such as GoodReader, Mail, Safari and Maps to look up various items that related to what the plaintiff was saying.  Every time I switched back to Word I had to wait a short moment to load the document back into memory … until one time, about 45 minutes into the deposition, when instead of loading my document I just saw the main screen of Word.  Where was my document?  I looked at the list of recent documents and it wasn’t there.  Ugh.  After trying everything I could think of to locate my document, I gave up and I started a new Word document and used it for the rest of the deposition and all was fine.  It did occur to me that with my first document I never saved it under a specific name.  (Tap the second icon on the left of the screen and then select name.)  I didn’t think that I needed to do so since Word for iPad kept telling me that it was auto-saving the document even without a name, but maybe if I had given the first document a specific name it would have showed up in my recents list after the crash?  I’ll have to explore this more, and it turned out that the first 45 minutes of my depo were just background information anyway so I didn’t lose anything of value, but it could have been a big disaster.  In the future, perhaps I will stick to Pages for taking notes until I feel that this has been fixed.]

In the Reddit earlier this week, Rick Schaut said:  “The biggest challenge [porting Word from the Mac to the iPad] was working within the resource constraints of an iPad vs a desktop Mac, and the issues span a wide gamut from memory to processor speed to battery usage. Getting Word’s scrolling to be so smooth as it is, for example, took a fairly impressive engineering effort.”  I know that Microsoft has to use some major tricks to get so much of the full version of Word to work within the memory constraints of an iPad.  Hopefully, Word for iPad will remain stable; nobody likes to lose work.

By the way, here is a picture that the MacBU/Apex team shared of the equipment that they use to test Microsoft Office for iPad on multiple different iPads with different configurations:

Pricing

Word for iPad is free*.  The * indicates that you can download the app from the App Store for free, and you can use the app to view Word documents, but if you want to edit Word documents you need to have an Office 365 account.  And here is where things get confusing.  I think the following description is correct, but I might be missing something about all of the different plans.

One option is to get an Office 365 Home Premium account, which is what I have been using for the past year.  That lets me install Office on up to five computers (Mac or PC) at my house and also lets me use Word, Excel and PowerPoint for iPad on up to five tablets.  It costs $9.99 month or $99.99 a year.

If you want your law firm to pay for Office 365, then you need an Office 365 for Business plan that supports desktop and mobile apps.  Options include Office 365 Small Business Premium for $150 per user per year, for up to 25 users.  If you are in a larger law firm, you may need Office 365 Midsize Business, which is $180 per user per year, for up to 300 users.  For larger companies there are different rates.  [UPDATE 9/8/14:  For more information on the Office 365 licenses that can be used by lawyers, read this post.]

Of course, your law firm probably already has some sort of license agreement with Microsoft, and if you don’t currently use Office 365, then you need to investigate what it will cost to add mobile support for your users.  Talk to your Microsoft rep.

I hear some people complain about the price, but for lawyers I have no doubt that this cost is worth it.  Whether you are paying $100 a year for several of your home computers and tablets or $180 or more a year for a single user license in a large organization, you are paying for both the computer software and the iPad software.  Considering how important Microsoft Word is to attorneys, this is a small but essential cost of doing business.

Conclusion

I have been using Word for iPad for two weeks, but I have been using Microsoft Word, in one form or another, for over 25 years.  I think that almost every attorney should have Word on the computer in their office, and similarly, Word for iPad is so good, and such an important app, that I think that every attorney who uses an iPad should get Word for iPad.  If nothing else, just use the free version of the app as a great document viewer.  But to do real work with the app, you’ll want to have an Office 365 account.

As noted above, this 1.0 version of the app has some limitations.  For an app that I really like, I’m surprised how many times I had to use the word “workaround” in writing this review.  Hopefully many of these limitations will be addressed in future updates.  On Reddit this week, a member of the Excel for iPad team stated:  “One of the great things about Office 365 being a subscription is that you can expect to get frequent updates, so stay tuned!  We think you’ll like them.”  And Rick Schaut from the Word for iPad team stated:  “I can’t say what will or will not be in the next version of Word, because those decisions are always in flux. I can say that we’re always thinking about what we should include, and we’re always working to find the best mix of features across our broad base of users.”

Word for iPad is already a fantastic app today, and I look forward to seeing how it is improved in the future.

Click here to get Microsoft Word for iPad (free): 

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