iPad smackdown: Microsoft Office vs. Apple iWork vs. Google G Suite

The iPad makes a great laptop, and nowhere is that more obvious than in its productivity tools. Apple showed the way years ago with its iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote), and Microsoft has validated the notion with its Office suite (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint). Of course there’s also Google G Suite (Docs, Sheets, and Slides), which includes mobile versions of the apps for iOS.

[UPDATED MARCH 27, 2017] Which of these office suites should you use on your iPad? Part of the answer depends on the functionality of the individual apps, but part depends on your greater ecosystem—namely, how your iPad productivity work fits into your overall productivity work on computers and other devices. That of course is for you to decide. Naturally, I’ll focus here on how these three suites stack up in terms of functionality and ease of use. 

In a nutshell, one of these iPad productivity suites is powerful, but doesn’t fit well in a cross-platform, Windows-dominated environment. Another works across all major platforms, but is quite limited on the iPad. Only one of them is both highly functional on the iPad and a good fit in a cross-platform environment. This review shows you which suites work best on the iPad; in our companion review, you can see which productivity suites work best across Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android.

iPad productivity smackdown: Core capabilities compared

Apple, Microsoft, and Google all consider their productivity suites to be more than a collection of apps. Instead, the three companies see them as services that work across computers, mobile devices, and the web, so users can go with whichever client is at hand to access their centrally stored documents, as well as share those documents with other people for collaboration.

Office for iPad is included with an Office 365 subscription, though the apps tend to go overboard in asking you to sign in—it’s much too often. Nonsubscribers can use a subset of Office’s editing capabilities for free. iWork for iPad is free for iPad owners. G Suite is free if you have a Google account, though there is a paid version for enterprise and government use that adds Exchange-like administration capabilities.

File handling. Naturally, Office for iPad natively supports the Office file formats, and it does an excellent job of maintaining file compatibility as documents are moved among its desktop and mobile apps.

iWork has its own file formats, but it does a very good job of importing and exporting the standard Office and RTF formats as well. In both Office and iWork, font differences are the biggest culprits in unwanted reflow and problematic display as documents move from one platform to another.

G Suite also uses its own file formats, but it can import and export native Office files. In iOS, G Suite can work directly on native Office documents, but doing so dramatically reduces the editing and formatting capabilities for these documents, so you need to convert your documents first to Google’s formats, then export them when done for non-Google users. Google’s conversion between its formats and Office’s formats is less faithful than iWork’s conversion, especially around layout, but it’s adequate for basic documents. Advantage: Office and iWork (tie).

The iOS versions of Office, iWork, and G Suite can export files to PDFs, but only iWork can export text documents to the ePub format and spreadsheets to CSV. The internal code in Apple’s ePub export, however, is very messy and littered with local overrides that inhibit further editing or proper TOC generation; it’s not up to snuff for publishing documents for use in the iBooks Store or other e-bookstores, but it’s fine for distributing documents for co-workers to read in the iBooks app or similar e-readers.

The Office apps also support exporting to the OpenOffice formats, which are less useful than iWork’s extra formats. Advantage: iWork.

Both Office and iWork can print to AirPrint-compatible printers, though the control for doing so in Office is not in iOS’s standard Share menu (which Office doesn’t use) but in the File menu. G Suite supports both AirPrint and Google’s own Cloud Print protocol, but printing is not intuitive: You have to preview a document (using the More menu) to get the Print option. Advantage: None.

All three suites use iOS’s Open In facility to send a document to another app. They each bring you to the Send a Copy menu item in different, multistep methods, as none has the Share menu available at a top level. Advantage: None.

Office and G Suite let you make a copy of your document while it is open (use the File menu in Office; use the More menu’s Share & Export option in G Suite). iWork does not; you must duplicate the file in the document viewer before you open it if you want to save your changes as a copy. Advantage: Office and G Suite (tie).

All three suites autosave their documents while you work on them, though Office lets you turn off autosave when working in a document if you desire. Advantage: None.

iWork lets you apply a password to individual files, which neither G Suite nor Office do. Advantage: iWork.

Both Office and iWork let you revert a document to a previous version. iWork makes the process easy: Select a document in the document viewer, tap Versions, and choose the desired version to revert to from the list that appears. Reversion in Office is trickier: If the file is stored in OneDrive, you can use the File menu’s Restore version to open a list of recent versions in your browser, then restore a previous version. If the file is not stored in OneDrive, you can revert only to the last-saved version on your iPad. G Suite has no reversion capability. Advantage: iWork and Office (tie).

Cloud capabilities. The three office suites assume the use of cloud storage, particularly Apple’s iCloud Drive for iWork, Microsoft’s OneDrive for Office, and Google Drive for G Suite. All three suites present documents stored on their respective services in their default document views, with the ability to create folders and move documents among them.

Both Office and iWork support iOS’s cloud plugin architecture, in which you can open and save files to other cloud services, in what Apple calls Locations. This OS-level feature is a bit clumsy to open (in the files view, you click More to access it in Office, and you click Locations in iWork) and navigate. Box, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, and OneDrive all support Locations, but Dropbox supports it only for saving files, not opening them. That makes using Dropbox with iWork difficult.

By contrast, Office directly supports Dropbox, so you can easily open and save files without going through the Locations feature. Office also directly supports corporate SharePoint repositories via Office 365. By contrast, G Suite supports only local files and Google Drive. Advantage: Office.

iCloud Drive is a sync-and-store service, so it keeps a local copy on each device after iCloud syncs, and you can access at least recent documents even without an internet connection. Both OneDrive and Google Drive are traditional sync-as-needed services, so you need a live internet connection to open any document that you did not explicitly store on your iPad. However, both Google Drive and Office (both the apps and OneDrive) let you store files locally on your iPad, though you need to do so manually, which is easy to forget.

All in all, the iWork suite is more usable while traveling on airplanes and other typically disconnected (or expensively connected) environments. Advantage: iWork.

Common user interface: The ribbon interface in Word—indeed, in all Office apps—is surprisingly easy to use, and I’m someone who can’t stand it in Windows or on the Mac. iWork’s user interface is more compact and requires more switching within tabbed panes, but it is also clearer about the results you’ll get. G Suite uses a similar interface approach as iWork, but its interface confusingly changes based on whether you are editing a native Google document or a native Office doc. Advantage: Office.

All three apps use a document viewer to present your available documents and to create new ones, as well as rename, duplicate, import, and share files. They look quite different from one another, but the differences are more cosmetic than functional. Advantage: None.

iPad productivity smackdown: Word processing compared

All three suites’ text editors do the basics: enter, edit, and format text; format paragraphs and lists; search and replace text; insert and edit tables; insert images; and spell-check text. 

However, Google Docs can check spelling only in files saved in the Office formats, which is a major limitation because G Suite apps have very limited editing capability when working with Microsoft’s native formats. Basically, if you want to check spelling, you can’t do much editing in Docs in the first place. That effectively means Docs on the iPad can’t spell-check.

Google Docs also treats revisions tracking in odd ways. If you open a Word file, you can enable revisions tracking, but because Docs can do so little with Word files, that’s a useless scenario. Docs for iPad can display revisions in Docs files and let you accept or reject them—but only if revisions tracking was turned on for that document in Docs in Chrome OS or in a browser, through the Suggesting option. You can’t initiate revisions tracking in the iPad version of Docs. Advantage: Word and Pages (tie).

Word and Pages offer much more formatting capabilities than Docs, such as text backgrounds, text boxes, footers and headers, shapes, footnotes, and columns. Both have ruler views. Advantage: Word and Pages (tie).

None of the apps—Word, Pages, nor Docs—supports paragraph and character style creation and editing in their iPad incarnations. All three preserve styles applied to imported documents, and both Word and Pages let you apply those imported paragraph styles to text on the iPad (though not character styles). But you can’t create your own styles on the iPad, which makes it hard to do stable document formatting. Advantage: None.

Word and Pages are nearly equal in their capabilities, with only a few differences around the edges. For example, Word lets you lock specific authors from making revisions in a shared file, whereas Pages does not. But Pages offers a much richer set of preformatted tables and charts than Word does, it supports mathematical equations, and it lets you password-protect files. Advantage: Word and Pages (tie).

iPad productivity smackdown: Spreadsheets compared

It’s a similar story for spreadsheet editing. Google Sheets has only basic capabilities: cell and text formatting; row, column, and cell insertion and deletion. Both Microsoft Excel and Apple Numbers are rich with functionality, and they do nearly everything the desktop versions do. However, you don’t get the more complex features like pivot tables, linked spreadsheets, and macros that the Mac and Windows versions offer. Advantage: Excel and Numbers (tie).

Both Sheets and Excel offer a strong selection of formulas, while Numbers has a smaller set. But note that if you work on native Excel files in Sheets, the number of formulas and formats declines significantly, and you lose some formatting options such as strikethrough and decimal place settings. Advantage: Excel.

All three apps — Excel, Numbers, and Sheets—offer a rich set of data formats. Numbers offers richer formatting options for tables and images than Excel does. (Excel has more chart options, though.) Numbers supports several number formats—pop-up menus, star ratings, check boxes, sliders, and steppers—that a traditional Excel user would shake his or her head at, but they work well for nontraditional but common spreadsheet uses as a list manager and interactive dashboard or calculator. Advantage: Numbers.

As of the 3.1 release in late March 2017, Numbers lost the adaptive onscreen keyboard that mades numeric and formula entry easier than Excel’s more standard onscreen keyboard. Numbers’ new keyboard is more consistent across all data types, and offers more capabilities, but it takes more steps to use then before. That’s likely why Apple added a button to switch to a numeric keyboard in the Numbers 3.11 update released on April 25; it’s still more work to access than the pre-3.1 version but better than what 3.1 did.

Excel provides the ability to sort contents within selected cells, columns, and rows, which Numbers does not—and that’s a common spreadsheet capability whose omission in Numbers would frustrate those who normally use Excel. Advantage: Excel.

iPad productivity smackdown: Presentations compared

Google Slides is a relatively more capable app than its word processor and spreadsheet analogs. Slides lets you create and edit slides, along with their content, and even add speaker notes. If you use the native Slides file format, you can include tables in your slides, as well as apply borders to text boxes and adjust line spacing. PowerPoint and Keynote do all that, too. Advantage: None.

Nonetheless, PowerPoint and iWork Keynote are leagues more sophisticated. Both support dozens of build effects and slide transitions, and you get the same sophisticated charting, table, and shapes tools here as you do in the rest of the Office and iWork suites. Plus, you can insert videos from your iPad’s Photos app. Advantage: PowerPoint and Keynote (tie).

Both PowerPoint and Keynote also let you set up presentations to autoplay; Keynote even lets you associate a music playlist from the Music app to a slideshow. By using a subset of Keynote’s collaboration capabilities (called Keynote Live), Keynote lets you publish a presentation to the web for others to view at their convenience. Advantage: Keynote.

PowerPoint and Keynote also let you annotate your slides as you present them, with a simulated laser pointer and the ability to draw on your slides, such as to post to an item or underline text as you speak. PowerPoint’s presenter view shows the upcoming slides (which you can jump among) and your presenter notes. Advantage: PowerPoint and Keynote (tie).

Keynote assumes you’re remotely controlling your presentation from Keynote on your Mac, iPhone, or iPod Touch via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi Direct, so it puts the speakers notes and upcoming slides on that device. Keynote’s remote-control capability is very handy, especially if you (like me) tend to walk the stage while presenting.

PowerPoint can’t do that, but it lets you control your presentation from your Apple Watch—if you run that presentation from your iPhone. (So does Keynote.) G Suite’s Slides can’t do any of this. Advantage: Keynote.

iPad productivity smackdown: File collaboration compared

Productivity functionality such as editing and formatting have been pretty stable since the late 1990s, so the differences are more about what the vendors choose to support rather than about innovation. In recent years, the innovation has been in collaboration. 

All three suites support document sharing: You can invite people to open a document for viewing or for editing (your choice), or you can send them a hyperlink to that shared document. In all three cases, editing requires that the recipient have the appropriate account (iCloud for iWork, Office 365 for Office, or Google Drive for G Suite).

iWork has sharing support for Android users, but they can only view shared documents. Shared iWork documents can be edited only in a Windows PC or Mac browser, or in iOS or MacOS via an iWork app. Shared Office documents can be edited in Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android via the native Office apps on those platforms or via a desktop browser on a PC or Mac. Shared G Suite documents can be edited in iOS and Android via the native mobile apps and in Windows, MacOS, and Chrome OS via a browser. Advantage: Office and G Suite. 

In the case of Office, editing links are permitted only if enabled by your Office 365 administrator, but you can also share documents directly with other corporate users from the Office apps. Also, after you create a link, Office closes the sharing tool, which makes you think it canceled out. What actually happened? Office copied the link to the Clipboard and closed the tool, but it doesn’t let you know that. iWork and G Suite simply present the link for you to copy yourself. Advantage: iWork and G Suite. 

Although Office lets users edit a document simultaneously if they’re all working in a browser, the Office apps allow only one user to edit the document at a time; all other users are locked out of editing mode while that document is open in an app. That difference is likely to trip up users. iWork and G Suite both allow simultaneous editing both from their apps and from browsers. Advantage: iWork and G Suite. 

iWork also helpfully adds an icon to the top of the screen for a shared document, as well as in the document viewer, reminding you that the document is currently shared; Office and G Suite do not give you any such easy reminder. All three apps let you see who the document is shared with. Advantage: iWork.

iWork lets you assign a password to a file shared for editing, and you can unshare the link from within iWork. When working with personal files (not stored on your corporate OneDrive for Business or SharePoint repository), Office doesn’t let you assign a password to a shared file for editing, and it doesn’t let you disable that sharing, either in the Office apps or in the OneDrive app.

G Suite does not support passwords for shared editing links, but like Office it offers a direct-sharing capability to individual users. In the enterprise version of G Suite, sharing works the same way as direct sharing does in a corporate Office 365 environment. Advantage: iWork.

In Office, you can manage individuals’ access to corporate documents shared directly with other corporate users from within the Office apps. iWork doesn’t have this concept of personal versus corporate use, and Google handles it by making you sign in and out of accounts, with one-at-a-time access. Advantage: Office.

Overall, Office gets the win, mainly because its sharing works best in a multiplatform environment and best supports corporate data-management needs. Both iWork and G Suite provide easier user interfaces.

Productivity showdown: Making a choice

It should be clear that the choice is between iWork and Office. Of course, that needn’t be a choice, since iWork comes with your iPad, and it’s a rare business that won’t provide Office to its employees. (That is why Microsoft has tied the iOS and Android versions of Office to having an Office 365 subscription, to force the issue for companies with mobile workers.)

G Suite is not nearly functional enough on iOS to make the iPad viable as a mainstay production device. G Suite really only supports production use on a computer browser, with its mobile apps suitable only for touchup work.

Because Office and iWork are nearly equivalent in their productivity capabilities, your decision will be driven largely by two other factors:

1. Office dominance. Because Office for iPad looks and works very much like Office for Android, Office 2016 for Mac, and Office 2016 for Windows, it makes a lot of sense for a “Microsoft shop” to have everyone use Office everywhere. That reduces training requirements and slightly eases document flow. In more heterogeneous environments, iWork’s strong file compatibility with Office means you can have your iWork and Office too.
2. Collaboration and cloud differences. All three suites differ most in how they handle files in the cloud and support collaboration. Even when their functionality is the same, how they deliver that functionality can differ significantly. Most companies will go to Office now that the underlying OneDrive cloud storage engine works decently across all platforms, and now that OneDrive has SharePoint integration. Plus, Office has the best cross-platform support.

The good news is you really can’t go wrong with Office or iWork. The more Apple-centered you are, the more iWork is plausible. But Office has the key advantages of working well across all platforms and fitting in easily with your existing Office infrastructure.