The must-have iPad office apps, round 9.5

Google's newly completed Apps suite can't beat Apple's improved iWork or Microsoft Office

The on-the-go business app toolkit for the iPad
Of the tens of thousands of apps available for the iPad, only a relative few are must-have tools for business use. In the last year, the landscape for iPad office apps has changed dramatically, with multiple updates to iWork, the introduction of Microsoft Office, and Google's elimination of the beloved Quickoffice with its own Apps suite.

Read on for our picks of the best native office editors, cloud office editors, and native companion productivity tools for the iPad. (Most work on the iPhone, too!)

InfoWorld scorecards: The major native office apps
In the past year, three major editing suites vied for adoption among iPad users: Microsoft Office for iPad and Google Apps for iOS both debuted to compete with Apple's powerful iWork suite. At the app level, both Apple and Microsoft released major updates to their presentation, spreadsheet, and word-processing offerings. All support the native Office file formats, and iWork and Apps export to them as well.

A few office suites are still available from smaller providers (scored on the next slide), but for most people, the focus is on these three.

InfoWorld scorecards: The other native office apps
Despite the competition from the big three platform providers, a trio of established suites is still available for the iPad: the venerable Documents to Go Premium, the Android-derived Polaris Office, and Picsel Smart Office. Although all support the native Office formats, the unpleasant truth is that none is a worthy competitor to Apple's or Microsoft's apps.

Best word processor: Apple Pages
Apple's Pages is good at layout-oriented documents, and it offers revisions tracking, tables, spell checking, search and replace, text formatting, graphics insertion, commenting, password protection, AirPrint support, and both ePub and PDF export. It also permits multiuser editing via the Web (but with no revisions), now with password protection.

The mid-October update added direct access for saving and opening files from both Apple's iCloud Drive and third-party cloud storage services (Box and Dropbox). Pages also supports Apple's Handoff capability for Pages on other iOS devices and Macs.

You must copy a file before editing, as there's no Save As feature once you begin editing. You can't create or apply character styles, and you can't create paragraph styles.

App: Pages
Price: $9.99 (free on new devices)
Developer: Apple
Compatibility: iPad and iPhone

Runner-up word processor (tie): Microsoft Word
Word for iPad is equivalent in editing capabilities to Apple Pages, missing password protection and comment insertion but supporting hyperlink insertion and allowing you to choose the proofing language.

Word doesn't tie with Pages due to its poor file-handling and file-sharing capabilities -- you can't send documents to other apps, rename files, or manage file folders. But it now supports AirPrint.

App: Word
Price: Office 365 subscription ($10 to $12 per month)
Developer: Microsoft
Compatibility: iPad

Runner-up word processor (tie): Infraware Polaris Office 5
Perhaps the best office suite for Android, Polaris Office provides the capabilities you need and is similar to what Pages and Word provide, without Word's file and sharing limitations. Plus, it offers direct access to cloud services for opening and saving files, allowing you to work more easily across platforms. Where Office 5 fails to measure up is in user experience, which is basic, and performance, which is a bit slow; it also lacks the sophistication of Pages and Word.

App: Polaris Office 5
Price: $12.99
Developer: Infraware
Compatibility: iPad and iPhone

The rest of the iPad word processors
Google Docs (free with a Google account) is a midlevel word processor, awkwardly integrated with the Google Drive service and lacking core capabilities like table editing. However, it supports revisions tracking, printing, and (as of late October) the use of heading styles.

DataViz's $16.99 Documents to Go Premium offers the basics, but no more. It is slow and lacks key features: graphics insertion, paragraph styles, and revisions tracking. Its only advanced feature is its extensive support for cloud storage, including iCloud.

Artifex's $9.99 Smart Office 2 is, in a word, unusable due to a very poor user interface and limited capabilities. Accessing cloud storage requires signing up for spam.

Best spreadsheet editor: Apple Numbers
Apple's Numbers spreadsheet editor is great at data entry, especially numeric, date, and formula info. The keyboard even adjusts based on the type of data you're working with. Cell formatting is less flexible than in Excel, and Excel users may dislike Numbers' approach to creating worksheets: Numbers allows several on a page. It also nicely supports multisheet workbooks and provides CSV export, animated charts, and password-protected group editing via the Web.

It supports AirPrint and both PDF and CSV export.
The mid-October update added direct access for saving and opening files from both Apple's iCloud Drive and third-party cloud storage services (Box and Dropbox). Numbers supports Apple's Handoff capability for Numbers on other iOS devices and Macs, as well.

App: Numbers
Price: $9.99 (free on new devices)
Developer: Apple
Compatibility: iPad and iPhone

Runner-up spreadsheet editor: Microsoft Excel
Although Excel for iPad has the same serious file and sharing flaws as Word, it works exactly like Excel jockeys would expect, with oodles of functions and a few key features like pane freezing that Numbers lacks. However, Excel may frustrate even Excel fans when they discover they can't remove inserted charts.

Still, Excel's instant familiarity will likely trump its deficits for current desktop Excel users, even if Numbers technically offers more capability overall.

App: Excel
Price: Office 365 subscription ($10 to $12/month)
Developer: Microsoft
Compatibility: iPad

The rest of the iPad spreadsheet editors
Google Sheets (free with a Google account) is like Excel to a certain degree. But using formulas is difficult, as is working with cell ranges via touch gestures.

DataViz's $16.99 Documents to Go Premium offers the basics, but no more. It's languished for several years, so it's not a good investment choice. For example, it does not support printing or PDF export.

Infraware's $12.99 Polaris Office 5 has a competent if basic set of spreadsheet features, but its user interface is awkward.

Artifex's $9.99 Smart Office 2 is simply unusable due to a very poor interface and limited capabilities.

Best presentation editor: Apple Keynote
Simply put, Keynote is an amazing slideshow editor. We prefer it over PowerPoint even on a computer. On the iPad it works beautifully when creating complex slide transitions and element effects, which competing apps can't do. It has lots of animation capabilities, password-protected Web-based collaborative editing, and the ability to remotely control a Keynote presentation on another Mac or iOS device.

It supports AirPrint and PDF export.
The mid-October update added direct access for saving and opening files from both Apple's iCloud Drive and third-party cloud storage services (Box and Dropbox). It also supports Apple's Handoff capability for Keynote on other iOS devices and Macs.

App: Keynote
Price: $9.99 (free on new devices)
Developer: Apple
Compatibility: iPad and iPhone

Runner-up presentation editor: Microsoft PowerPoint
The first release of Microsoft PowerPoint was neither basic nor sophisticated, with sufficient features for editing and basic presentation creation. But a revision boosted PowerPoint's features significantly, making it nearly as capable as Apple's glorious Keynote in terms of slideshow pizzazz. If only it allowed remote control of presentations from an iPhone!

App: PowerPoint
Price: Office 365 subscription ($10 to $12/month)
Developer: Microsoft
Compatibility: iPad

The rest of the iPad presentation editors
DataViz's $16.99 Documents to Go Premium is less than basic when it comes to presentation editing, allowing only text touchup.

The free-with-Google-account Slides presentation editor is not quite as basic, but it doesn't support transitions and has trouble saving changes and resizing elements. And it can't show presenter notes while presenting -- d'oh!

Infraware's Polaris Office 5 runs slowly when working with slideshows and offers only basic capabilities.

Artifex's $9.99 Smart Office 2 is unusable due to a very poor interface and limited capabilities.

InfoWorld scorecards: Cloud office apps
As Apple, Google, and Microsoft battle over in-the-cloud office editing on the desktop, the action on the iPad centers around native apps. But several cloud-based tools use iPad apps as the front end, doing the heavy lifting in the cloud, including AstralPad, CloudOn Pro, Microsoft Office Web Apps, and OnLive Desktop.

Cloud-based office editors: CloudOn Pro and Office Web Apps
The $48-per-year CloudOn Pro service used to be a nice way to run standard desktop Office from your tablet. No longer -- a late-October revision eliminated that approach for Word documents, replacing it with a less-capable editor about on par with Google Docs. Excel and PowerPoint editing is still done via a Windows Server-based Office 2010 session, but they seem to run less smoothly than before. We can no longer recommend this product.

The hosted Office Web Apps work nicely in the iPad's Safari browser. It'd be our choice for cloud-based traditional Office editor except it can't access local iPad files or print. (Log in from office.microsoft.com.) Note: You need a Microsoft account or compatible Office 365 account.

Cloud-based office editors: AstralPad and OnLIve Desktop
The free AstralPad provides moderate editing capabilities, but it's very slow, allows only two open documents, can't print, requires manual keyboard activation, and has a confusing interface. It does allow access to Dropbox and Google Drive files.

The free OnLive Desktop is a horrible Office hosting service. Ignore it.

Amazon Web Services offers its WorkSpaces Windows-in-a-cloud service for $35 per month, which has an iPad app. However, it's clearly meant as a PC replacement, not an iPad adjunct, so we did not test it.

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The 8 Most In-Demand Big Data Roles

The 8 Most In-Demand Big Data Roles
As more organizations begin to get on the big data bandwagon, demand for IT professionals with the skills to collect, organize, analyze and architect disparate sources of data is on the rise.

Demand For Big Data Skills On the Rise
In today's digital world there is no shortage of data. In fact, many times there seems to be too much. Companies are investing in cloud technologies, mobile technologies and social media. Combine that with everything else it takes to run an organization and you start to see how much data is being collected. Along with the rise of this data is an increase in demand for people who can collect, organize and make sense of it, according to recent data from Kforce, a staffing firm headquartered in Tampa, Florida.

The salaries listed here are from and are based on a typical IT professional working 40 hours a week.

ETL (Extract, Transfer and Load) Developers
With the eruption of data and the variety of data types that companies are seeking to take advantage of, there has been a significant increase in the need for professionals with the skills to acquire and integrate big data. ETL developers mainly work with different sources of data an organization may have and creates ways to extract data from sources, as well as, import it and modify it to fit the needs of the organization and then add it into a data warehouse.

"Given that the ETL software industry is rather mature, these positions are likely to have some of the longest tenures in the Big Data resource pool, and are often a mix of employees and contract resources," says Greg Jones, CTO of Kforce.

Hadoop Developers
Hadoop is a Java-based, open source framework that supports the processing of large data sets. According to Kforce, data within the framework of Hadoop and various technologies are in high demand -- Hive, HBase, MapReduce, Pig and so on. This is due to the data volume demand, and the fact that the cost to process terabytes/petabytes with conventional business intelligence tools would be too cost prohibitive as well as take too long without massive distributed processing.

"Individuals with experience in the Hadoop framework are the most sought after resources in today's big data landscape. These positions tend to be primarily contract resources as organizations mature their long term big data strategy," says Greg Jones, CTO of Kforce.

Visualization Tool Developers
Massive amounts of data can prove challenging to analyze. New types of visualization toolsets like Spotifre, Qlikview and Tableau allow for intuitive and speedy data probing. While these positions could fall close to a generic business intelligence developer category, Hadoop is really hot now and is a new breed of a specialized skill set, according to KForce.

"These skills are highly sought after in the short run as contract resources. As the supply of these resources catches up to the demand, and the toolsets mature, it is likely that the rates for these positions will moderate, and therefore more of these resources will converts to full time employee positions," says Greg Jones, CTO of Kforce.

Data Scientists
Previously referred to as data architects who were a part of IT, the data scientist is a new breed of technology professional able to tie their data organization techniques into business value propositions. They must also have great communication skills to explain data findings to both IT leadership as well as business leaders. These data scientists typically have their own sandbox in which to explore and examine an organization's data and help drive innovation.

"Part analyst, part artist, a data scientist is somebody who is inquisitive, who can stare at data and spot trends. It's almost like a Renaissance individual who really wants to learn and bring change to an organization," says Anjul Bhambhri, vice president of big data products at IBM.

OLAP Developer
On-Line Analytical Processing developers are experts in the optimization of data organization to empower what Kforce calls, "slice and dice" analytics. This is the process of taking data from relational or nonstructured data sources and creating dimensional models -- often referred to as "Star" and "Snowflake" Schemas, and then building the User Interface to access the data via high performance predefined queries.

Data Warehouse Appliance Specialist
"These individuals specialize in appliances such as Teradata, Neteeza and Exadata, according to Kforce. The core responsibilities associated with this role include data integration, administration and optimization of performance associated with these high end machines. These special appliances are used in an organization to provide Massive Parallel Processing (MPP), by using optimized memory, disk and data storage architectures specific to an analytics processing environment." - Kforce's Big Data Team

Predictive Analytics Developer
"Predictive analytics are used heavily in marketing organizations to predict consumer behavior and target product audiences," according to Kforce.

This role can at times seem somewhat similar to the data scientist in the exploratory nature of what they do, examining many "what if? " scenarios associated with an organizations data. These highly skilled IT workers are experts in building potential business scenarios, and utilizing assumptions based on historical data performance to test thresholds and predict future performance.

Information Architect
"Big Data has created a renewed interest in Data Mastery," according to Kforce's Big Data Team

To take full advantage and build an actionable plan using the company's data takes a special skill set. Information architects must know how to define and document key elements and ensure that data is being organized and interpreted in the most impactful way. Master data management, business knowledge and data modeling are all key skills you'll need if you'd like to occupy this role.

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Chromebooks' success punches Microsoft in the gut

Chromebooks' success punches Microsoft in the gut
Amazon, NPD Group trumpet sales of the bare-bones laptops in 2013 to consumers and businesses

Chromebooks had a very good year, according to retailer Amazon.com and industry analysts.

And that's bad news for Microsoft.

The pared-down laptops powered by Google's browser-based Chrome OS have surfaced this year as a threat to "Wintel," the Microsoft-Intel oligarchy that has dominated the personal-computer space for decades with Windows machines.

On Thursday, Amazon.com called out a pair of Chromebooks -- one from Samsung, the other from Acer -- as two of the three best-selling notebooks during the U.S. holiday season. The third: Asus' Transformer Book, a Windows 8.1 "2-in-1" device that transforms from a 10.1-in. tablet to a keyboard-equipped laptop.

As of late Thursday, the trio retained their lock on the top three places on Amazon's best-selling-laptop list in the order of Acer, Samsung and Asus. Another Acer Chromebook, one that sports 32GB of on-board storage space -- double the 16GB of Acer's lower-priced model -- held the No. 7 spot on the retailer's top 10.

Chromebooks' holiday success at Amazon was duplicated elsewhere during the year, according to the NPD Group, which tracked U.S. PC sales to commercial buyers such as businesses, schools, government and other organizations.

By NPD's tallies, Chromebooks accounted for 21% of all U.S. commercial notebook sales in 2013 through November, and 10% of all computers and tablets. Both shares were up massively from 2012; last year, Chromebooks accounted for an almost-invisible two-tenths of one percent of all computer and tablet sales.

Stephen Baker of NPD pointed out what others had said previously: Chromebooks have capitalized on Microsoft's stumble with Windows 8. "Tepid Windows PC sales allowed brands with a focus on alternative form factors or operating systems, like Apple and Samsung, to capture significant share of a market traditionally dominated by Windows devices," Baker said in a Monday statement.

Part of the attraction of Chromebooks is their low prices: The systems forgo high-resolution displays, rely on inexpensive graphics chipsets, include paltry amounts of RAM -- often just 2GB -- and get by with little local storage. And their operating system, Chrome OS, doesn't cost computer makers a dime.

The 11.6-in. Acer C720 Chromebook, first on Amazon's top-10 list Thursday, costs $199, while the Samsung Chromebook, at No. 2, runs $243. Amazon prices Acer's 720P Chromebook, No. 7 on the chart, at $300.

The prices were significantly lower than those for the Windows notebooks on the retailer's bestseller list. The average price of the seven Windows-powered laptops on Amazon's top 10 was $359, while the median was $349. Meanwhile, the average price of the three Chromebooks was $247 and the median was $243, representing savings of 31% and 29%, respectively.

In many ways, Chromebooks are the successors to "netbooks," the cheap, lightweight and underpowered Windows laptops that stormed into the market in 2007, peaked in 2009 as they captured about 20% of the portable PC market, then fell by the wayside in 2010 and 2011 as tablets assumed their roles and full-fledged notebooks closed in on netbook prices.

Chromebooks increasingly threaten Windows' place in the personal computer market, particularly the laptop side, whose sales dominate those of the even older desktop form factor. Stalwart Microsoft partners, including Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, have all dipped toes into the Chromebook waters, for example.

"OEMs can't sit back and depend on Wintel anymore," said Baker in an interview earlier this month.

Microsoft has been concerned enough with Chromebooks' popularity to target the devices with attack ads in its ongoing "Scroogled" campaign, arguing that they are not legitimate laptops.

Those ads are really Microsoft's only possible response to Chromebooks, since the Redmond, Wash. company cannot do to them what it did to netbooks.

Although the first wave of netbooks were powered by Linux, Microsoft quickly shoved the open-source OS aside by extending the sales lifespan of Windows XP, then created deliberately-crippled and lower-priced "Starter" editions of Vista and Windows 7 to keep OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) on the Windows train.

But Microsoft has no browser-based OS to show Chromebook OEMs, and has no light-footprint operating system suitable for basement-priced laptops except for Windows RT, which is unsuitable for non-touch screens. And unlike Google, Microsoft can hardly afford to give away Windows.

But Microsoft's biggest problem isn't Chrome OS and the Chromebooks its ads have belittled: It's tablets. Neither Microsoft or its web of partners have found much success in that market.

Baker's data on commercial sales illustrated that better than a busload of analysts. While Windows notebooks accounted for 34% of all personal computers and tablets sold to commercial buyers in the first 11 months of 2013, that represented a 20% decline from 2012. During the same period, tablets' share climbed by one-fifth to 27%, with Apple's iPad accounting for the majority of the tablets.

"The market for personal computing devices in commercial markets continues to shift and change, said Baker. "It is no accident that we are seeing the fruits of this change in the commercial markets as business and institutional buyers exploit the flexibility inherent in the new range of choices now open to them."

But when you're at the top of the personal computing device heap -- as Microsoft was as recently as 2011 -- words like "change" and "choice" are not welcome. From the mountaintop, the only way is down.

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