MS Office for iPad to Hit Store Shelves Soon
Fans of the Microsoft Office Suite will be happy to know that they will soon have the option of working with Word, Powerpoint and Excel directly and natively on their iPad. Microsoft is reportedly submitting their application to the Apple App Store very soon.
Even if other Microsoft Office apps are not made available, the triad of Word, Powerpoint and Excel will allow you to interact easily with basically the whole business world and make life easier for many of you. While there are certainly other alternative apps that will do basically the same thing you are still dealing with importing and exporting and that always leaves a larger margin for errors and differences. What I’m curious about is whether the password protection feature in Word will be preserved and function on the iPad as this is a problem with the current word processing options.
The apps themselves are getting a bit of a facelift, taking on Microsoft’s trademark “Metro” design like we have seen on the Windows phone and upcoming Windows 8 operating system. The expectation is that the existing Microsoft OneNote application already available on iOS will receive the same updated design and interface.
The most interesting part of all this news is that apparently Microsoft does not intend to release this application suite for any other competing platforms, including Android. While they can always reserve the right to change their mind this could certainly be a huge blow to Android’s ability to break into the corporate market and make significant strides as a competitor for the share of the pie currently held by RIM.
There is no word yet on a specific release date or pricing details, but I think we can expect it will be relatively soon and that the costs will be reasonable –especially considering the costs of a desktop license for the Office Suite.
[Image credit - The Daily]
