Microsoft Launches Office for iPad

Microsoft Launches Office for iPad

Microsoft is launching a version of its Office suite of productivity apps for Apple’s iPad, the company announced at an event in San Francisco on Thursday.

The app suite, which comprises Word, Excel and PowerPoint, will go live in the App Store at 2 p.m. ET. The apps are much more full-featured than their counterparts on iPhone, with extensive editing tools. However, you’ll need to be an Office 365 subscriber to use all of them. Non-subscribers can still view and present documents.

“When it comes to Office 365, the vision is pretty straightforward,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said. “It’s about giving Office users the same experience on any device they want to use. Our commitment going forward is to make sure we drive Office 365 everywhere. That means the web, tablets, all phones and PCs.”

The Office for iPad apps will look familiar to Office users, complete with tables, Microsoft fonts and the Ribbon, which has pop-up menus that appear when you tap an icon. The iPad version includes some unique features, such as a custom numeric keypad and table recommendations in Excel. It also has a built-in connection to OneDrive, and the iPad apps support real-time collaboration within documents, which Microsoft rolled out in the fall.

Microsoft also said it would soon bring Office into the Windows Store, meaning it would be a version that runs in the touch-first modern environment on Windows PCs. The current Office 365 suite of apps runs in the desktop on a PC.