Microsoft Office still isn't available for iPad, but now HopTo fills the void

November 14, 2013

Eventually, Microsoft will bring a touch-optimized version of Office to the iPad. Until that day arrives, however, there’s Apple’s iWork—and now HopTo, which offers a reskinned version of Word as lovely and useful as an iPad app should be. Best of all, it’s free, and the HopTo app is available Thursday in the Apple's App Store. Why try it? Because other virtualized, cloud-based versions of Office have largely failed to gain traction on tablets, hamstrung by the need to route virtually every instruction through a remote server. The virtualized apps are slow and unresponsive, and always threaten to disconnect and crash at the worst possible time. Worse still, users have typically had to pay for their troubling experiences, often via a monthly subscription. The alternative has been to use native iPad apps. Apple’s iWork suite is probably the preferred choice, but there’s also ByteSquared’s Office2HD and DataViz Documents to Go Premium. But various quirks—such as Apple Page's burial of the “Save As” command, for example—have left some users pining for something that makes more sense. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2062785/microsoft-office-still-isnt-available-for-ipad-but-now-hopto-fills-the-void.html#tk.rss_all