When you want to, you’re not limited to Apple’s iWork, Google Docs, and third-party office suites. Three apps, in conjunction with their respective cloud-based services, let your iPad connect to a virtual Windows server running in the cloud and run the Windows version of Microsoft Office remotely:;;.
Here’s how they compare. CloudOn Opening up CloudOn, you don’t feel like you’re connecting to a remote Windows desktop. Instead, it looks like a file browser. CloudOn connects directly to your, or cloud-storage account, and the app opens with a directory listing of those accounts.
Above the list of files are three icons: One for selecting your view (list, icon, or one that looks a bit like CoverFlow). The middle icon provides access to CloudOn’s settings, Help, and a tutorial.
The third lets you launch Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You can open an app from that icon or tap on one of your files in the file browser; in the latter case, CloudOn opens it in the associated app. Once open, those apps look much like their Windows desktop counterparts: There’s the ribbon near the top of the screen, the document below that. Above the ribbon are tabs for the different ribbons (Paragraph, Insert, and so on). CloudOn has done a fine job making Office touch-friendly: Tap on the tab for the ribbon you want to open and then on the tool you want to use. Selecting text is similarly simple. You can double-tap to select a word or triple-tap to select a line.
Or, you can tap-and-hold then drag the cursor to select an arbitrary range of text. For text input, you get the standard iOS keyboard, augmented by a row of special keys (Control, Alt, Shift, Tab, and so on). There’s no onscreen proxy-mouse, but I never found I missed it. So far, only the file browser portion of CloudOn has been optimized for the third-generation iPad’s Retina Display. The Office apps themselves—including any text in your documents—have a somewhat fuzzy appearance, but the company says it is looking into ways of improving the display of other parts of the app. CloudOn gives you Windows apps without the Windows desktop—and uses the standard iPad keyboard, supplemented with an extra row of keys.
When you’re done editing, tap on a bar in the top-left corner of the screen; CloudOn autosaves your document and takes you back to the file browser. There, you can perform basic file-management chores like copying, moving and renaming files. If you have accounts with both Dropbox and Box, you can access both in the browser. CloudOn is currently.
Nivio The nivio service provides iPad access to Microsoft Office, Outlook, Publisher, and Access as well as to programs from companies including Adobe, Google, and more. You’ll find text and graphics editors, PDF tools, and even CAD software. Those apps are available for rent. Most have free trial periods; after that, pricing varies by vendor.
(For example, after your trial you can rent the Office Standard 2010 suite for $15 per month.) In addition to app rental fees, you must pay for the nivio service itself after your initial 30-day trial period;. You can access nivio through your iPad’s browser or using the third-party app as a nivio client. If you opt for the latter, after you’ve installed the app, you must go back to nivio in your browser, log in to your account, and then tap Launch nDesktop. That launches the app, switches you to it, and opens your nivio desktop. Unfortunately, PocketCloud can’t store your nivio login info, so you must repeat this tedious procedure every time you use the service.
Nivio offers a selection of more than 40 apps you can rent by the month. Once opened, nivio presents you with an actual Windows desktop. On that desktop are five icons: nApps, nDrive, Help, Internet Explorer, and the standard Windows Recycle Bin. If you select nDrive, you get nivio’s built-in file browser, displaying your documents.
Mac Id On Ipad
There are two main ways to get docs up there: via the nivio Web interface’s Upload link or the; both work, though neither is quite as simple as something like Dropbox or Box. If you tap on nApps, you get a palette presenting the range of apps. To use one, you tap on its Get Now link to install it, then you tap Launch to start it up. The nivio service provides a clever mouse-like cursor for the iPad screen, which can not only be used to click on things, but also provides some handy keyboard combinations (Alt-F4 and the like). You can, if you wish, use your finger to hold-and-drag onscreen items, just as you would normally on the iPad. Of the three apps tested for this article, nivio was the least Retina-friendly; everything looked distractingly jagged on my third-generation iPad. In my testing, I found that nivio suffered from the lagginess that afflicts many remote-desktop apps: I’d click on something onscreen and then wait for that click to take effect.
File access is also awkward: You must first upload the files you want to work on to the service, by visiting the nivio site in your Mac’s browser, logging in, clicking on an Upload Files link, and selecting the files. In sum, nivio does some clever things—that mouse cursor, for example—but doesn’t make the Mac-to-iPad integration as seamless as it could be. OnLive Desktop Like nivio, OnLive Desktop puts an actual Windows desktop on your iPad.
New Mac Ipad
But rather than offer you all the apps that nivio does, OnLive gives you just the main Office apps—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—plus Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer, and a few others. OnLive Desktop Standard is free, including 2GB of cloud storage, but limits Web browsing to the OnLive site.
Mac Ipad Pro
If you want access to other websites (including Dropbox and Box), you must, the least expensive of which is OnLive Desktop Plus at $5 per month. Although the display is not perfectly crisp on a third-generation iPad, it’s far better than the other services, and this contributes to a greater sense that you’re actually using a Windows computer. As with CloudOn, you can use standard iPad taps to interact with the Windows interface, or use the app’s Windows-optimized pop-up keyboard. I found the on-screen keyboard to have too much lag for my comfort, but the responsiveness may depend on the speed and quality of your Internet connection. OnLive Desktop gives you a nice-looking selection of standard Windows apps but relies on a nonstandard keyboard that was sometimes slow to respond.
As with nivio, file management in OnLive is awkward. You have a Windows-standard My Documents folder where you can save files from the Office apps. You can upload and download files to and from that folder through a Web browser from another machine. But while the paid versions of OnLive tout their compatibility with Dropbox and Box, that access isn’t well-integrated: To edit a file stored in one of these cloud-based services, you must navigate to it using Internet Explorer from within OnLive Desktop. From there, you can download it and open it in the associated app or save it to your OnLive documents folder. And if you open it in one of the Office apps, the only place you can save it is to OnLive; you can’t save it back to Dropbox. One note: OnLive has been experiencing.
Bottom line For now, CloudOn offers the most seamless experience of the three Windows-on-your-iPad apps, although OnLive Desktop currently looks nicer on a third-generation iPad. In my testing, I found CloudOn more responsive than OnLive or nivio, as well as more intuitive; it makes Office feel more like a native iPad app than either of the other two.
It also has the virtue of being free. But if you need to edit Windows Office documents and guaranteeing file compatibility is your top concern, all three services offer viable—if imperfect—solutions.