Collabora Office

Useful port of OpenOffice. Thankfully, you can access Cloud accounts. It is limited because it doesn’t seem you can load extensions, which can be useful, especially for spell-checking of lesser used languages.

Crashes badly, unusable UPDATE 9/7/2024: major new update and same bugs - crashes when open a spreadsheet created in LibreOffice. UPDATE 16/11/2023: yet another update has not fixed crashes, totally useless. Can I give zero stars?

Native client coming soon (I hope)

Crashes badly, unusable UPDATE 18 Jul 2023: yet another update has not fixed crashes, totally useless. Can I give zero stars?

Basic 1+2 arithmetic is ok but anything else is awful. There,s no online help other than a short non-searchable useless document. I,ve just spent an hour trying to unhide a row. It’s really only useable as a viewer.

This is a good free software office suite, but it’s in dire need to keep up with MS compatibility more frequently.

When I first started using this, it was an acceptable app…not as good as LibreOffice on Mac but did the job. However, recently it hangs within a couple of minutes, regardless of whether the file I’m accessing is in Dropbox or OneDrive. I have to close the app which then loses all my work, rendering it unusable. Please fix!

Lots of the UI elements don’t work with a cursor, can’t even select texts with it. It’s 2022, there are many using their iPads with mice or touchpads.

Very difficult to use, especially if pasting in data from another source. Clunky and slow.

Updates are few and far between. I’d almost call this abandonware. Libre Office (Linux, Mac) updates regularly and is always improving but Collabora seems to be static and set. That said, it’s the best office app for iPad and doesn’t spy on you using it. It is fiddly and can be difficult using a touch interface but once you get used to it, the app is basically OK. It should be much more and I’m looking forward to Libre finally porting the actual Office from Linux to iPadOS. Not holding my breath, though. In the meantime, this fills the gap.