Microsoft Office on iPhone: A Classic Tale 1.0 Version Heartbreak

I’ve been interested in getting an official Microsoft Office Suite for iOS for a very long time, so it was with great excitement and enthusiasm that I followed the link to the App Store and installed the office suite.  The first thing to note was that the version of Office requires a subscription to Office 365.  JMARK has a subscription, but if you haven’t gotten hooked up with Office 365 yet, you can get yours here:

Upon launching the app for the first time, I was greeted with a series of introductory slides.  Then I was permitted to connect Office on my iPhone to my JMARK cloud account.

After setting Office up, I was ready to edit some documents.  I selected the type of document to create, in this case a low-impact meeting agenda — you know, just to warm up before giving Office Mobile a real workout.

I noticed the auto-correct suggestions were a little odd.  Apparently there should be no managers present in a meeting.  I’ve never seen this suggestion on my iPhone before when typing in the word “Managers,” (it normally just recognizes the word “managers”) so I must assume that Microsoft has done something with the spellcheck within the app.

Moving on, I decided to save a draft to the cloud and see how it looked in my browser…

… but the app crashed.

… and crashed, and crashed.  Okay, I thought, let’s give it the benefit of the doubt, and see what else it can do.  This time I decided to try an Excel spreadsheet to track vehicle mileage.  I figured since that was one of the available templates it should go great.  I did find it odd that the input for numerical fields default to iOS’s alpha keyboard instead of the numeric keypad.

That raises a pretty substantial usability concern, but I’m sure we’ll see this addressed in a future release.  Having run through the basic app experience, I was ready to try saving again.

… But the app crashed again.  I rebooted my phone and cleared all the memory, but sadly, it crashed every time.

After trying everything in my iOS troubleshooting arsenal, I finally gave up on trying to save any document to the cloud using Office Mobile.  This is a great app, as long as you don’t mind spending twice as long creating or editing documents, having your correctly-spelled words automatically replaced with incorrect words and phrases at random, and don’t need to save or share your created files with anyone.

As excited as I was to have an official Microsoft-approved version of Office on my iPhone, I think I’ll stick with iWork for now.

I tried Office on an Apple iPhone 4S running the latest version of iOS.  Your mileage may vary.  If you give it a try, I’d like to hear your thoughts.  Post a comment back on this article, or better yet, drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter.