Well the day has finally arrived when Microsoft launches its Office products for Apple’s iPad. The App Store now has Microsoft favorites, Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
The stripped down versions of the products allow users to view but not create or edit documents but there are some features designed specifically for Apples flagship tablet. For the full user experience, subscribers will need to create an Office 365 account which costs around 70$ a year.
New Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says “When it comes to Office 365, the vision is fairly straightforward, it is to make sure that the one billion Office users have access to the high fidelity Office experience on every device they love to use. Today’s announcement marks one more step in that direction.”
Carolina Milanesi who is the strategic director of Kantar Worldpanel ComTech believes that Microsoft are finally giving users what they want and that they have been very clever by keeping the connection with Office365.
Milanesi stated, “Microsoft is giving users what they want.The connection to Office 365 was also interesting in that this puts users within Microsoft’s ecosystem at some point.”
It has been a very long time since Microsoft has released a product on a rival O/S before it has been launched on Windows but the move has been welcomed by iPad owners. At the moment the three apps, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are ranked No. 1, 2 and 3 on the App Store’s free iPad app list.
Have you downloaded these apps onto your iPad? Will you create an Office365 account to benefit from the full user experience?