It's Official: Microsoft Releases Office for iPad

As expected, Microsoft today announced Office for iPad, which is really a set of new mobile productivity apps—Word, Excel and PowerPoint—plus an update to OneNote, which was previously available. These apps aren't upscaled versions of the Office Mobile apps on iPhone, they're all-new apps engineered for the unique iPad capabilities and screen size.

"We thought a lot about what people want to do when they're on their iPad," Microsoft's John Case said. "We reimagined Office on the iPad, while retaining what people love about Office. In the future, we will bring Office apps to the Windows Store and other popular platforms."

You can learn more about Office for iPad in my Microsoft Office for iPad Review and Microsoft Office for iPad Screenshots. But the short version is simple enough: With this release, Microsoft has brought powerful, full-featured Office apps to iPad in a way that respects the user interface conventions that both Office users and iPad users will expect.

Office for iPad is free, but if you want to do more than view documents, give presentations, or perform other related duties, you'll need an Office 365 subscription. This includes any business version of Office 365, but also Office 365 Home Premium and the soon-to-be-released Office 365 Personal. With each of these subscriptions, you get licensing rights for Office on up to five tablets, in addition to five PCs.

You can download Office for iPad from the Apple App Store. It requires an iPad with iOS 7 or higher and is available in 29 languages and 135 different markets.

Additionally, Microsoft announced its new Enterprise Mobility Suite, which is a combination of existing Microsoft cloud services such as Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium, Azure Rights Management Services and Windows Intune. The firm describes it as "a comprehensive set of cloud services to help businesses manage corporate data and services on the devices people use at work and at home." But it's not currently clear how integrated the disparate parts are with each other.