If you decide it’s worth your money, then you’ll get full access to Excel’s features on your iPad, and your use cases are going to heavily determine how much you’re going to like this experience. That said, this is another subscription and you’ll have to decide if access to these apps is worth a recurring cost.
At as little as $6.99/month or $70/year and including all the other Office apps, as well as 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage, this is one of the best deals in productivity software out there. Microsoft Excel is a free download from the App Store, but you’re going to need an Office 365 subscription to actually do anything besides read Excel files. Excel has also made some compromises to work on iOS, but these compromises hurt the overall experience to the point that we expect most people will find this version of the app inadequate.
We recently dove into how Word adapted itself to the iPad and found it to have some compromises over the desktop version, but was ultimately a very capable app that would work for most people. Microsoft’s Office suite of applications has been a staple in most people’s personal and professional lives for decades, and their introduction on the iPad several years ago felt like a turning point in the iPad’s quest to becoming a “serious computer.” Several years later, these apps have grown up and are better than they’ve ever been before.
