Microsoft officially announced Microsoft Office for iPad on Thursday, pushing Microsoft’s office suite onto the most popular tablet in the market. A touch-based version of Office is also in the works for Windows, Julia White, a senior Office executive for Microsoft, confirmed. Microsoft Word for iPad, Excel for iPad and PowerPoint for iPad will all be free to download from the iTunes App Store, executives said. However, users will be only able to view existing documents. Microsoft will ask users to sign up for an Office 365 subscription – $12 per month for Office 365 Home Premium and $9 per month for the upcoming Personal plan – to actually create or edit documents. Office for iPad will integrate with a user’s OneDrive account, enabling a worker to create a PowerPoint presentation at the office, then edit and revise it on her train trip home. A document will remain consistently formatted, even if an Office implementation (such as Office Mobile) doesn’t support a particular feature. Why is this announcement so critical for Microsoft? Volume. Microsoft has put Office onto tablets before. The company shipped a special version of its core Office apps for its own Microsoft Surface tablet and its successor, the Surface 2. But estimates by IHS put Microsoft’s fourth-quarter Surface sales at just over a million units; Apple sold 26 million iPads during the fourth quarter alone. Microsoft’s core Office apps are actually the last to migrate to the platform, as Apple users have been able to download everything from Lync, Skype and Yammer to the iPad, while OneNote for the iPad has been available since 2011.
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 08:26:07 +0000
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