Unless you’re creating and editing graphs in Excel for iOS, you’ll probably find that the free version meets your needs. Microsoft’s new “free to create” pricing model, which requires only a free Microsoft account, means that Excel will be truly free for most users.
If you’re looking for a powerful spreadsheet app for iOS that makes it seamless to work between a Mac, a Windows machine, and any number of iOS or Windows Phone devices, Excel for iOS is for you. There are a few other areas of difference between the iOS, Mac, and Windows versions of Excel if you open help in Excel for iOS, you can see a chart that lays out the differences between each platform. On the iPad, the ribbon is always visible, and choosing a ribbon item only loses one line of the display.
From there, you tap another pop-up to select, for instance, Formulas, and then scroll through the formula browser. There’s also no room for the ribbon on the iPhone’s screen to call up the ribbon, you must first tap an Edit icon, which opens an edit area that takes up about a third of the screen. Much of the iPhone’s limited screen space is lost when working with the Ribbon. While I can see nearly as many cells on the iPhone as on my iPad-out to G and down to 33 on the iPad versus E and 32 on the iPhone-those cells are much smaller (and thus, harder to tap). While this is true, and Excel looks great on my iPhone 6, the reality is that it’s still really hard to work on a spreadsheet on a phone-sized device. The app is also universal, and has been optimized for smaller screens. I was able to open, modify, and save my Dropbox spreadsheets without any issues at all. (Pay attention here, Apple!)ĭropbox integration seems first-rate you login to your Dropbox account, and it then appears in the list of Places you can save and open things, right alongside OneDrive. I’ll admit I was surprised by this move Dropbox is a direct competitor to OneDrive, but it’s great to see Microsoft admitting that people do use other services. In addition to free editing, Microsoft has added Dropbox support to Office enter your Dropbox account details, and you can work with Dropbox as easily as you can with OneDrive. Enter Dropboxĭropbox is fully integrated into Excel, appearing next to OneDrive in Open and Save screens, as well as on the app’s Account screen. You’ll also get one terabyte of OneDrive storage, which can be used both in Excel and as a general cloud storage drive. If you want the premium features, you can get them via Office 365 Personal (one computer, one tablet, one phone) for $7 per month, or Office 365 Home (up to five of each device type) for $10 per month.
I was able to see an upgrade box only when I went to modify a chart I had created beyond that, the free version was functionally equivalent to the paid version I was using on another iPad. Creating, modifying, saving, printing… whatever the task, the free version never complained or cajoled me. But everything else I tried worked just fine.