Office App vs Office Desktop Apps

The versions of Word/Office that you can install on an iPad, iPhone, Android tablet or Android phone are all limited compared to the versions you can install on a Mac or PC. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-you-can-do-in-the-office-apps-on-mobile-devices-with-a-microsoft-365-subscription-9ef8b63a-05fd-4f9c-bac5-29da046833ea.

Therefore, I would not recommend replacing the laptop with an iPad, if you want to use all the features in Word. I'm assuming here that the laptop is running either Mac OS or Windows.

Hi kyoung_888,

Thank you for querying in this forum.

From your description, it seems that you want to know the difference between using Office applications on iPad and using Office applications on laptop.

If my understanding is right, we noticed that you mentioned college, may I know if you are using Microsoft Education account? If so, we will list some differences between them and hope that will help you:

1. For installation: on iPad, you can tap any of the buttons in App Store to install the individual Office apps on your iPhone or iPad. For more details, you can refer to this article: Install and set up Office on an iPhone or iPad. On laptop, you may need to refer to this article to download and install Office applications, Download and install or reinstall Microsoft 365 or Office 2019 on a PC or Mac
2. For use: Office applications have fewer features than Office on Windows. For example, we cannot record and run macros in Office for iPad, we cannot check grammar in Word for iPad, etc. However, we can use all of those features in Office for Windows. For more details, you can refer to this article: Compare Word features on different platforms Compare PowerPoint features on different platforms Comparing educational features of OneNote and Class Notebook across platforms and devices

If the scenario above is not consistent with yours, you can also post back and provide more details about your requirement, and we will focus on your specific scenario and provide specific suggestions. At the same time, could you also provide the product name you are using now?

Best Regards,

Sukie