Microsoft Office iPad News Update: Microsoft today released built-in iPad apps for its leading Office programs, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. According to ZDNet, the three new apps join the present iOS apps from the Office family: OneNote, Lync, OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, and an OWA app for Exchange-based email.
Today's release is a pleasant arrival for longtime Office users who've had to deal with mismatches and unproductive alternatives every time they pick an iPad. The announcement is done after four years of speculation and anticipation.
'These three apps are feature-rich, powerful tools for creating and editing Office documents. They look and act like their Office 2013 counterparts on Windows. And although these iPad apps obviously can't replicate every feature of the full desktop programs, they deliver an impressive subset of those features. Anyone who was expecting Office Lite or a rehash of the underwhelming Office for iPhone will be pleasantly surprised. Technically, there's no such thing as Office for iPad. Each of the apps is a separate download from the App Store. They're all designed for use on iPads running iOS 7 or later,' ZDNet reported.
The apps themselves are free, but you'll need an Office 365 subscription (Home, Personal, Small Business, or Enterprise) to unravel their full potential. You'll be limited to reading Word documents, working with Excel data, and presenting PowerPoint slide shows unless you activate the app by signing in with your Office 365 credentials. Only Office 365 users get to create new documents or use any of the rich editing tools.
These apps are specifically designed for cloud storage, using Microsoft's OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint.
ZDNet describes the apps as "fast and extremely responsive".
'Tap the button in the upper left corner, for example, just as in Office 2013 apps, to display a File menu that lets you create a new document, reopen a recently used file, or browse through local and cloud storage to find a specific file. (Using the OneDrive for Business app, you can mark files or folders to be cached for offline use.)
Commands for each app are grouped on ribbons that are more compact than their desktop alternatives. (To save space, you can tap the commands on the ribbon to hide the options for that tab, then tap again to make them visible again.) The number of options available on each ribbon is, likewise, limited in comparison to the full desktop programs,' as reported in ZDNet.
Office is still a desktop app with some grudging boundary nips designed to ease the pain of using an app without a mouse. Anyone who owns a Surface RT is likely to look enviously at these iPad apps, which for now are the highest standard for Office on a modern tablet.
