Popular wisdom holds that a tech device needs to run Microsoft Office to be successful with business users.
There are no versions of Microsoft Office designed to run on tablets like Apple’s iPad or Android-powered models; despite this, business users are buying lots of tablets – especially iPads. While lacking Microsoft’s seal of approval, there are many iPad and Android apps to view MS Office documents on tablets with several (including QuickOffice, Documents to Go and Apple’s iWorks apps for iPad) allowing editing of existing documents. If you really want to, though, there are ways to run “real” Microsoft Office on iPads and other tablets. Here are a few.
•You can remotely access a “real” computer – Windows or Mac – with various remote access services, open Office (or other applications), open saved documents and make changes as needed, all on your tablet screen. I like the free LogMeIn service, which does not require complex setup or poking holes in firewalls – a practice that’s frowned on (with reason) by IT departments.
Nice feature: remote access gives you access to any document or program that you can open or run on your “real” computer. Less nice: controlling the larger screen of your “real” computer using fingertips on a smaller tablet screen is awkward.
•Online service OnLive offers broadband access to PC games streamed from OnLive’s servers, playable on non-PC devices. This winter, it expanded the technology and now offers OnLive Desktop, which provides access to a Windows desktop complete with Microsoft Office 2010 to iPad and Android tablet users.
Free accounts get a stripped-down version of Windows with the Office applications, Internet Explorer and not much else. There’s no control panel or ability to add applications. Need to type? OnLive sessions use Windows’ touch features – including onscreen keyboard – rather than native iPad controls.
Free accounts also get two gigabytes of online storage. To edit a document, it first needs to be uploaded from a users’ PC or Mac – more storage and additional features are available with paid accounts, starting at $5 per month.
The miracle is that it works as well as it does. The problems, however, include (again) the awkwardness of controlling a full desktop system with fingertips on a tablet. As well, the OnLive Desktop system is completely independent from the tablet it’s running on. Want to check your email on your iPad? You’ll have to log back into OnLive Desktop. Want to copy and paste information from that open Word document to an email message? Sorry, you can’t.
•CloudOn (iPad only) tries to do less than OnLive Desktop; while OnLive offers a full Windows desktop, a free account and app from CloudOn just lets you run Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the Adobe Reader - full screen. In this case, though, doing less might mean doing better.
Not having a miniaturized Windows start menu makes opening the applications easier, as does having the applications running full screen.
CloudOn supports cloud file-storage services DropBox and Box.com and Google’s new Google Drive.
Google does not yet offer Google Docs editing on the iPad; with CloudOn, Google Docs files can now be edited on an iPad in the more powerful Microsoft Office applications.
But CloudOn suffers from the same disconnect from the rest of the iPad’s system as OnLive Desktop.
Still, I find it the best way to run the Microsoft Office suite on my iPad.
All of these ways of using Microsoft Office on a tablet require broadband Internet and will work slower with 3G mobile access than with WiFi; I haven’t tested them with the faster LTE available on new iPads (or Android tablets), but that should be an improvement. •
Alan Zisman (www.zisman.ca) is a Vancouver educator and computer specialist. His column appears every two weeks.
