The most impressive thing about the Excel iPad app isn't any one particular feature—it's the fact that it exists at all. When you work on a spreadsheet, it's not using like a word processor, in which you can make a typing error and your meaning will (probably) still be clear. In a worksheet, an input error could bankrupt your company or destroy your scientific results. A phone or tablet sounds, therefore, like a dangerous place to edit a spreadsheet containing anything more serious than your to-do list or cake recipes. But Excel for iPad does a surprisingly good job of reducing the risk, especially when you work on a high-powered tablet like the iPad ProSee it at Amazon UK with its Smart KeyboardSEE IT.

Excellent Design
Excel looks gorgeous on iOS, and its subset of features seems well chosen for the kind of work that it makes sense to do on a tablet. You can work with multiple tabs, select data to create a chart, and build formulas either by typing them in or by selecting functions from drop-down menus. A spacious screen like the one on the iPad Pro makes it easy to see a large amount of data; smaller screens like the one on the smaller iPads and iPad mini tend to feel cramped.

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As in the rest of the Office apps on the iPad, the tabbed interface offers a well-chosen feature set. The Insert tab, for example, lets you insert a table, pictures from a file or the tablet's camera, prebuilt shapes, a text box, chart, or comment. If you select a range of data, a Recommended button suggests an appropriate chart type. An Add-Ins button lets you install add-ins from approved vendors, including histograms and functions for live stock-price updates.

Getting Started
When you first try out Excel for iOS, I strongly suggest that you spend some time with a spreadsheet that you don't need to preserve, because you're almost guaranteed to delete the contents of a cell or column while you get the hang of swiping your way around the screen. Once you're comfortable with it, you'll begin to find nifty features that duplicate desktop-style features in the iOS interface. Autofill is one example: if you select two cells containing the years 2014 and 2015, a pop-up menu offers an option to Fill, in addition to the usual pop-up items like Copy and Clear. Tap on Fill, and you can then drag the selection down or to the right to fill in as many additional years as you need.

But don't be misled into thinking the iOS version can do all the similar tricks that the desktop version can—for example, you might expect to use the same autofill option that lets you combine two columns of text (first and last names, for example) into a single column, but that works only on the desktop version.