Which tablet to use for Excel?

[MFour]

Hi All

Doing some planning for the year ahead, and at some point soon I will be looking at going from manually filling out a pre-designed paper form to possible making use of a Excel on a tablet. It will need to be a pre-designed form with a few macros in to tally scores. Basically the form consists of a number of items, each with x-amount of tick boxes. The person using the tablet would need to tick a tick box for every item count, and the sheet then does the calculation to deliver an overall percentage. So Item1 could end up being ticked say 4 out of a possible 5 times. Once completed and back from the field, the results are then printed over a wireless network, to be collected by the user. Internet/wi-fi access will not be available in the field so that excludes cloud solutions, or am I wrong?

The sheets are done and dusted, currently using it on PC and Laptop. What I need to find out is which tablet (of the various flavours) would be able to do this without me having to re-mortgage my house to buy it?

Any thoughts would be much appreciated .

 

[Bundu]

I have also wondered about excel on tablet, as I use a lot of web queries in excel....

 

[vinodh]

A Windows 8 Pro tablet would be ideal because of native Excel support but will cost something ridiculous. Apple's Numbers app for iPad is good but may not be 100% compatible with all Excel spreadsheets and iPads are also not cheap. An Android tablet is the cheapest option but compatability may also be an issue. Best way would be to test your spreadsheet on different tablets first before buying. I'm willing to load up your spreadsheet on my iPad and test it if needed.

 

[rajharie]

Hi All

Doing some planning for the year ahead, and at some point soon I will be looking at going from manually filling out a pre-designed paper form to possible making use of a Excel on a tablet. It will need to be a pre-designed form with a few macros in to tally scores. Basically the form consists of a number of items, each with x-amount of tick boxes. The person using the tablet would need to tick a tick box for every item count, and the sheet then does the calculation to deliver an overall percentage. So Item1 could end up being ticked say 4 out of a possible 5 times. Once completed and back from the field, the results are then printed over a wireless network, to be collected by the user. Internet/wi-fi access will not be available in the field so that excludes cloud solutions, or am I wrong?

The sheets are done and dusted, currently using it on PC and Laptop. What I need to find out is which tablet (of the various flavours) would be able to do this without me having to re-mortgage my house to buy it?

Any thoughts would be much appreciated .

Best way is to have a Virtualised App environment. Use Citrix XenApp to deliver Excel to the client / tablet and it will not matter what tablet you have. Best option if you are doing this in a business as its not a cheap solution.

Personal/ SMME use, would recommend http://desktop.onlive.com/ or CloudON http://site.cloudon.com/ Have used both and prefer CloudOn

 

[cerebus]

I use Numbers on the iPad but I have to admit tablets aren't the best way of handling spreadsheets at all. But if you really really had to, you could virtualize your desktop environment easily enough with Splashtop and then do your Windows work, on pretty much any tablet. Higher resolutions will serve you better here though as well due to the fiddliness of it; so either an Asus Transformer or an iPad3/4.

 

[CataclysmZA]

Windows 8 RT would be capable of doing this since you can use Excel because it comes installed for free (Office 2013 Home and Student Edition). Everything else like printers and Wi-Fi connectivity would also be sorted. Something like a Windows 8 Pro tablet would be better, but its a hideously expensive solution in your case.