Editing Microsoft Office documents on your iPad using the Office Web Apps Preview
This might be common knowledge at this point, but it was news to me: the new preview versions of the Office Web Apps let you edit documents on your iPad.
I’ve tested so far:
- Excel
Lets you do all the usual stuff, including insert charts and graphs. Has touch-friendly selecting context menus. - Word
Very slow, even on the iPad 3, but fully-featured (including spell check!) and goes as far as having touch-friendly text selection.
To check it out:
- Log into your SkyDrive account in Safari
- You’ll be in the Mobile version. Scroll to the very bottom and in the bottom-right corner you’ll see “PC Site.” Click that.
- Now you’ve been redirected to the desktop version of SkyDrive. Tap on an Excel file in your SkyDrive, or tap ‘New Excel Document’ at the top.
- Presto — you’re editing it.
The editor is pretty functional. It’s slow, but you can even right-click: tap a cell, then tap it again to access the context menu. Tap a row header to get a green touch-friendly ‘dot’ that lets you drag to resize.
They’ve clearly built this to be touch-friendly, as right-click and drag-and-drop events don’t translate to touch devices. Not officially supported, but definitely something they’re working on for the future.
Note you’ll need to be participating in the Office Web Apps Preview for this to work. When you log into SkyDrive, you should get a prompt asking if you’d like to participate.
Nerdmemberance
I saw that Wal-Mart is putting the new iPad on sale at 12:01am tomorrow, and it made me remember how much of a shit show a Midnight launch at Wal-Mart can be.
In remembering, I began running down a list of midnight launches I’ve been to at the Wal-Mart in Crestview, FL:
- World Of Warcraft Collector’s Edition
- Nintendo GameCube
- Playstation Portable
I stopped there. Oof. It’s amazing I’m able to function in normal society.
