Guide Excel Ipad

The program loads quickly, contains more of Excel’s core functionality than I would have expected, and the transition from keyboard/mouse to full touch interface has been handled very nicely. For a company with a history of not doing well with touch (i.e. Office apps on Surface in Windows 8), the interface in Excel for iPad is surprisingly well thought out.

The window features six small buttons across the top of the screen, along with five words that are actually tabs on the yes-there’s-a-ribbon.

Excel for iPad’s interface takes up relatively minimal screen room, and is easy to work with even with large bumbling fingers.

Ironically, Excel for iPad can’t actually create cell notes, so the Review ribbon is only used to browse through the existing comments. The numeric keyboard, which combines mathematical symbols and numbers on one panel, greatly speeds entry of formulas. However, the image browser is restricted to photos stored on the iOS device; you can’t access any media files on your OneDrive, for example. The help system is relatively complete, including a comparison table that shows what you can do in each version of Excel (iOS, OS X, Windows), along with a touch guide that explains how to interact with your data.

By default, Excel for iPad constantly saves your work—so if you’re working on a mission-critical workbook, you’ll want to duplicate it first, just in case you do something bad. While the app itself is free to use (as a spreadsheet viewer), to actually edit workbooks, you need an Office 365 subscription, which will set you back $100 per year.

If you’re not a heavy spreadsheet user, and you’re perfectly happy using Office 2008 on your Mac, then you might view $100 per year as outrageously expensive. The touch UI is well thought out, and support for the full set of functions from the desktop apps means you can work on even complicated workbooks while away from your computer.

The main downside for casual users is the $100 per year price, which is expensive for those who don’t often need the full power of Excel on their iOS devices. For serious users, the $100 per year cost probably isn’t an issue, because of the number of machines and devices it covers, and the fact that it insures they’ll always get the latest and greatest version of the desktop and iOS apps.

Microsoft Excel (for iPad) Review

The most impressive thing about the Excel iPad app isn’t any one particular feature—it’s the fact that it exists at all. When you work on a spreadsheet, it’s not using like a word processor, in which you can make a typing error and your meaning will (probably) still be clear. A phone or tablet sounds, therefore, like a dangerous place to edit a spreadsheet containing anything more serious than your to-do list or cake recipes. Excel looks gorgeous on iOS, and its subset of features seems well chosen for the kind of work that it makes sense to do on a tablet. As in the rest of the Office( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) apps on the iPad, the tabbed interface offers a well-chosen feature set. When you first try out Excel for iOS, I strongly suggest that you spend some time with a spreadsheet that you don’t need to preserve, because you’re almost guaranteed to delete the contents of a cell or column while you get the hang of swiping your way around the screen. You can create and modify charts in iOS, but you won’t find all the formatting options that let you fine-tune the visual design you get in the desktop version. This makes it possible to use your finger or the Apple Pencil ($98.99 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) to draw lines and shapes over a worksheet, but it has one inconvenience: you can’t use the Apple Pencil as a pointer to select cells, because it becomes a drawing tool whenever you touch it to the screen.

If you need to use a spreadsheet for serious work, and you need to use it on a tablet, Excel is the obvious answer—and it’s the only choice that’s available on all major platforms.

Sort table data in Numbers on iPad

You can sort data in a column alphabetically or by increasing or decreasing values. Note: If the sort options aren’t available, your table might have cells merged across adjacent rows. Tap at the bottom of the screen, then tap an option: Sort Ascending: Sorts the table rows in alphabetical order (A to Z) or by increasing numerical values based on the data in the selected column. For example, you can sort a list of swimmers by age and then by their time in an event.

The result orders the swimmers at each age level according to their speed.

A Beginner’s Guide to Excel on the iPad – The Sweet Setup

Microsoft’s Office suite of applications has been a staple in most people’s personal and professional lives for decades, and their introduction on the iPad several years ago felt like a turning point in the iPad’s quest to becoming a “serious computer.” Several years later, these apps have grown up and are better than they’ve ever been before. We recently dove into how Word adapted itself to the iPad and found it to have some compromises over the desktop version, but was ultimately a very capable app that would work for most people.

If you decide it’s worth your money, then you’ll get full access to Excel’s features on your iPad, and your use cases are going to heavily determine how much you’re going to like this experience. However, if you do more complex work in Excel or use it to edit multiple file types, then this version of the app is very lackluster.

This makes moving between devices quite seamless, but the only way you get this cross-device feature to work is if you are storing your files in OneDrive. If you want to start fresh, Excel offers a few dozen templates ranging from budget calculators to invoices to schedules, in addition to the traditional blank spreadsheet. These are nice starting points, and you can download different templates online and open them seamlessly in Excel. Your first run at editing these files will likely be pretty smooth as well, as you can tap around and do most basic functions intuitively. I’m also happy to report that the iPad app loads complex documents quickly and you can navigate between large data sets across as many tabs as you can throw at it with ease.

Once you get past these initial steps, it likely won’t be long before you run into things that are either slower than they are on the desktop or simply not possible. The basically non-existent keyboard controls make lots of actions either harder than they are on the desktop, or at least different enough that people (including me!) Maybe there are more people out there who need this more than we think, but adding a remedial drawing interface over what should be a powerful productivity tool feels like the wrong move.

I’ll stop there, but the main takeaway is that the interface feels stuck between two worlds in its current form. This may be fine by you, but could be an issue if it is a very large file that takes a long time to upload and then re-download from this conversion service.

This is not a phenomenon you’ll see when pasting data from something like Apple Numbers or Google Sheets, so it’s very odd to see from Excel.

If you give someone else the ability to edit, they’ll be able to open the document and start making changes or leaving comments in real time.

Google Sheets is not a good iPad app, as it bucks iOS standards at almost every turn and manages to feel both too complicated and too limiting all at once. Hopefully, Microsoft will continue to iterate on this app and bring it up to the standards they hold the desktop version to, but as of right now it has a long ways to go.

Collaboration works great and performance is impressive, but complex operations and customization that many people rely on just isn’t there yet.

Open a spreadsheet in Numbers on iPad

Note: When you open a spreadsheet saved in iCloud Drive, it’s automatically downloaded to your device. If you don’t see the spreadsheet you want to open, try searching for it, or tap the link in the top-left corner to browse Recents or a different location. If your connection is slow or you’re offline when this happens, images in the spreadsheet may appear at a lower resolution until you’re online again or the template finishes downloading.