Hands on With Microsoft Excel for iPad’s New add-in Support

Microsoft has announced that Office for iPad apps will gain the ability to use add-in apps like its desktop and web Office components. The first one out the gate is Excel for iPad. Note that this is the same app that can be used on the iPhone too. However, the add-ins are only available when used on an iPad. Let’s take a short tour of the add-in installation process, and some of the strengths and weaknesses I found when testing out this new capability on my iPad.

First, a brief history: Add-ins first appeared for Microsoft Office 2013 on the desktop and on the Web (Apps for Office) in 2012. The free and paid add-in apps can be found either in Microsoft’s Web store from within the Office client itself. If you are wondering where the free-to-use Office Web apps are, you can find them (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote) in Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage service.

Note that you do not need to have Office installed on a desktop or notebook in order to use Excel for iPad. You will, however, want a Microsoft account. If you use one of Microsoft’s cloud service like Outlook.com or OneDrive, you are all set to go on this front. The latest round of updates for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint brought support for storing documents on DropBox and Apple’s iCloud. However, you plan to use the Office web apps as I do here, get a Microsoft account.

The new “Add-ins” feature is in Excel’s “Insert” tab. Tapping it brings up a few recommendations.

Tap the “See All” menu option see other apps that may interest you. The first thing I noticed is that the initial set of apps shown in the Apps for Excel Office web store is very different from the set of apps you first see from within the Excel iPad app. This is not necessarily a bad thing, however. Most of the apps I saw from with Excel on the iPad were add-ins from Microsoft or Microsoft Research. This may provide some level of comfort if it is your first time installing and using an add-in with Excel.

Tap the add-in you want to install from the Office Add-ins window. I started with the free Bing Maps add-in.

The last step before you can actually use the add-in with Excel is to read through what the add-in does with your data and, if its potential actions are acceptable, to tap the “Trust it” button.

I have to confess something here: I cheated. It turned out that the Bing Maps add-in works with Excel on an iPad. However, like many applications that were designed for use with a mouse or touchpad, its user experience loses something in translation. And, here is where it is very useful to have a Microsoft account and use its OneDrive cloud storage.

I had problems with the inserted overlapping the spreadsheet data and, seemingly, being able to move or delete the map object. This, however, is because Bing Maps is a mouse-centric add-in that wants you to “hover” a mouse pointer over specific edge segments in order to manipulate the map object.

This problem was resolved by closing the spreadsheet on the iPad (Excel locks files stored in OneDrive), bringing up OneDrive in a desktop web browser and then working with the Bing Map object using the Excel Web app to move the map and select data from the spreadsheet. Closing the Excel Web app and opening the spreadsheet on the iPad let me work with the add-in by, for example, tapping a named location on the map to display the underlying spreadsheet data.
 

Two questions are answered here:

1. Is it possible to run more than one Excel add-in?
2. Are there add-ins that do not need a mouse?

I selected the Wikipedia add-in from Microsoft itself to answer these two questions.

You can see in this screenshot that both the Bing Maps and Wikipedia add-ins are displayed and working at the same time in Excel on the iPad. And, tapping on one of the names of the western state capital city names in the spreadsheet taps into Wikipedia as you expect.
Issues

I found a couple of issues with the new Excel add-in feature. The first and biggest problem is that the Excel app crashed frequently during tasks such as installing and add-in or simply working with a spreadsheet. No data was lost because of the crashes. But, they were annoying and slowed the testing process. The second issue is a common one in the app world: Add-in discovery. Although there only appears to be a few dozen add-ins for Excel, there should be a faster and easier way to explore and discover useful add-ins. The third issue was the general slowness of accessing data from OneDrive on a relatively fast Internet connection (download speed ranging from 35 to 50 Mbps). You may, however, choose to use local storage on the iPad or other cloud service (iCloud or Dropbox).

Issues aside, add-ins for Excel today, and for Word and PowerPoint in the near future, brings its use on the iPad one more step up the “serious scale.” I’ve found the iPad to be a productivity machine since its launch in 2010. But, others were not convinced. Add-ins for Microsoft Office on the iPad may be one of the features that convinces them the iPad is for serious work.