Office Mobile.. a poor excuse.

Posted by mmaestro on February 22, 2012 03:56 pm 22

Oh, Microsoft. Your Windows Phone really is great: snappy, easy to navigate, and efficient (with an obligatory complaint about the lack of multitasking when dealing with things like IMing). In fact, having switched back to Android for app support for a few days, WP really felt superior. Good job.

But it seems I made one fatal assumption: that the Office Suite would be good. You can see how someone would make that assumption: Office is Microsoft's crown jewel alongside Windows, competing for top billing in Microsoft's product portfolio. It would therefore stand to reason that Office on Microsoft's cellphone platform would be the best mobile office suite available, right? This is one of their big products, their big selling points.

So I was out on a job today, and I needed to redo some paperwork. I grabbed the spreadsheet, and tried to highlight some rows to remove them. No dice. you can only highlight one row at a time. OK.. let's just do some editing, a number here, a serial here, a.. wait, why did that number get its format changed? Well, I'll just change the cell format to number and... what in the hell do these icons mean? I guess that one's currency, and this other one is.. I don't know. And there's only 2 format choices for a cell? Well, I don't want currency, I'll try the other.. nope. That's not it. Crap. I can't change the cell format to number?!? OK, well this cell over here seems to be a number format, so I'll just copy the cell, and then WHAT IN THE HELL DO YOU MEAN I CAN'T EVEN COPY A CELL? IN EXCEL? ARE YOU ACTUALLY TRYING TO MAKE THIS PRODUCT USELESS?

At this point, I just gave up. Mobile Excel may be usable to browse a spreadsheet you've received in email, but even basic editing is beyond it. That's more than disappointing. Frankly, one of the reasons I bought a Windows Phone was because I assumed the office suite would be best in class. Instead, it seems like a sad joke. Android has a half dozen office suites with more functionality, and to add insult to injury, I got back to the office to discover Google's revised Google Docs.

So here's my hint - and my appeal - to Microsoft. If you're going to make ads belittling Google's productivity software, you need to make a better product than Google. Right now, Office Mobile isn't even close.