Now you can download Microsoft Office for iPad and open Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Onenote files for free in iPad. This is for the first time Microsoft has decided to open it Office tools for free to all iPad users.
Download Office for iPad
Just visit the Apple App store on iPad and you will see the Microsoft Office for iPad as a featured app and it is topping all App store charts right now.
But remember – Each download comes for 200MB+, so if you have a small storage 16GB iPad, downloading these 4 apps will take 1GB off your iPad storage.
Office iPad Benefits
You can open any Word, Powerpoint or Excel file in iPad instead of the default iPad viewers. So you will see these files as exactly as they will appear on other computers will full Office software versions. Alternate viewers sometimes fail to display additional formatting features. So this is a great step forward.
Office 365 Subscription
If you want to create or edit these documents, you will need to buy an Office 365 subscription. Which basically means these Office Apps are basically viewer applications if used for free. If you want to create or edit documents, or spreadsheets, or powerpoint presentations – you will need a subscription.
If I decide to use the full unrestricted power of Office Apps, an Office 365 subscription for 5 PC/Mac/ plus upto 5 tablets costs INR 420 per month or INR 4200 per year. Seems reasonable. So what is the catch – this is a yearly subscription – unlike your current Office CD software which is chargeable only one time you buy and use for a lifetime.
Also note that Office 365 will work only on Windows 7, Windows 8 and Mac OSX 10.6 or higher. Which means if you decide to upgrade all your Office software on PC/Macs, you need to have updated versions of Windows/OSX as older Windows versions will not work.
Well that said – its time to download Office for iPad as Microsoft get ready for a massive flow of Office 365 subscriptions.