Microsoft certainly took its time releasing Office for iPad. Now that the apps are finally here, the most common sensation - other than irritation about the high price of fully functional Office apps - is disappointment. The ship has sailed, Microsoft. No one wants Office on their iPad anymore and if they do, it's probably because they are already suckered into an Office 365 subscription.
There are bigger and better alternatives to Office in the App store. All of them are cheaper than the requisite $6.99 or $9.99 a month Office 365 subscription you need in order to do literally anything to your documents on your iPad and some of them are even free. Yes, I said free.
iWork
The most obvious alternative to Microsoft Office, is obviously Apple's iWork app suite. When Apple launched the iPad Air and iPad Mini with retina display last year, it announced that the entire iWork app suite would come preinstalled, with full functionality on every new iPad. Apple iWork includes Pages, Numbers, Keynote, iPhoto, Garage Band, iCloud and iMovie. These apps are effectively the equivalent of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive and then some. The iWork suite includes apps that Microsoft Office doesn't even have and it's free on new iPads. If you have an older iPad, you pay $40 for the whole suite, but you pay that price only once - not every month.
Just in case that's not all you need to know to be convinced, here's some more food for thought. You can edit, export and store any document you create in an iWork app and save it to iCloud or anywhere you want for free. There are no hidden fees, no subscriptions and you still find almost the exact same functionality. You can edit and create photos, movies, documents, spreadsheets and more using iWork, just as you would with Office.
The Microsoft Office app suite when paired with Office 365 Premium for $9.99 a month will give you the ability to share the software on five PCs or Macs in addition to five iPads or Windows tablets, so depending on how much you and your family use the Office app suite, it could potentially be worth your while. However, if you just use Word, PowerPoint and Excel for school and basic work, you really do not need to pay $9.99 a month to use Office when you can do everything you need to do on iWork.
Google Drive
Google Drive is another excellent alternative to Microsoft Office, simply because its free and readily available on iOS. Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations and Forms are all contained in one app and you get 15 GB of cloud storage for all of your documents free. If you manage to use all that storage up, Google's newly lowered cloud storage prices should keep you happy. After all, you can get 100GB of cloud storage for only $1.99 each month, which beats the hell out of Microsoft's price of $6.99 or $9.99 for Office 365.
The other great part about Google Drive is that since its in the cloud, it doesn't take up space on your iPad. It all goes into the cloud, where it is easily shared with collaborators, who can also edit the document with you and track changes. Google Drive is also quite universal and can be exported, saved offline and shared in large groups. All the documents automatically download in Office document format, too, so there are no compatibility issues when you email your documents to someone else.
QuickOffice
Yet another great Microsoft Office alternative for iPad, QuickOffice, also comes from Google. Much like Drive, it allows you to edit, share, collaborate and create documents. The app includes Sheets, Docs and Slides, which in essence are Excel, Word and PowerPoint for free. In QuickOffice, you can access all the files you have saved in Google Drive, edit them, share them and email them to others. The app also allows you to open and edit PDFs. It is also free.
Others
Evernote, Quip, SwiftKey and other note-taking apps are also free for iPad. These apps are decent replacements for Word, but won't cover you if you need PowerPoint or Excel. Still, most people just want Word on their iPads anyways with the occasional use of Excel or PowerPoint, so any of these note-taking apps when used in conjunction with Google Drive or iWork should more than fulfill your needs.
