Unveiled Office for iPad · Chronopin

Unveiled Office for iPad · Chronopin

On 27 March 2014, at a press conference in San Francisco, Microsoft "unveiled Office for iPad - specifically Word, PowerPoint and Excel", as part of what it called its "mobile first, cloud first approach"^[1][3][4][5]
It was Satya Nadella's first public press conference as CEO, 52 days after he replaced Steve Ballmer; Nadella framed it as "the first step on a journey" at the "critical intersection of mobile and cloud"^[3][4][5]
The three apps went on sale in the App Store the same day - reported as from 11 p.m. PT Thursday by one account and 2PM ET by another - and are free to download: free versions read Word documents, view Excel data and present with PowerPoint, while "To get the full editing and creation experience, you need an Office 365 subscription", from $70 per year^[1][3][4][5]
They require an iPad running iOS 7.0 or later, and shipped in 29 languages and, as of that day, 135 markets; a subscription covers Office for iPad on up to 5 tablets plus 5 copies for PCs and Macs, and the new Office 365 Personal - $70 per year for one device, against $100 annually for the five-device premium subscription - "will also qualify when it becomes available later this spring"^[1][4]
Alongside the iPad apps Microsoft made Office Mobile for iPhone and Android phones free for everyone, as it already was on Windows Phone, in the App Store and Google Play^[1][4]
Reaction noted at the time: Tim Cook tweeted "Welcome to the #iPad and @AppStore! @satyanadella and Office for iPad", Box CEO Aaron Levie said "Better late than never", and TIME judged it not game-changing, with file compatibility and formatting fidelity likely its biggest benefit^[4][5]
Context given: Office accounted for 90% of the business division's revenue in the last fiscal year, and VP of Marketing John Case said the aim is to turn Office into "a first-class cloud service"; Microsoft said it would bring Office apps to the Windows Store and other popular platforms in future^[1][3]

Notable features

Office for iPad is Word, Excel and PowerPoint as separate iPad apps, the first dedicated version of Office for tablet computers^[2][6]
The apps were built for touch rather than ported: Julia White said it is "definitely not the Windows app ported to the iPad", demonstrating a touch-sized Ribbon, a numeric keyboard in Excel and a built-in laser pointer, pens and highlighters in PowerPoint; Word keeps track changes, threaded comments and in-place chart editing, and files save to OneDrive by default with simultaneous multi-person editing and offline access^[1][4][5]
Documents keep their full formatting: in Word, images, tables, SmartArt, footnotes and equations; in Excel, formulas, charts, sparklines, conditional formatting and filters; in PowerPoint, transitions, animations and speaker notes, with content and formatting maintained across Office on PC, Mac, tablet and phone^[6]
The apps use iPad features such as voice dictation to draft a Word document and AirPlay to project a presentation wirelessly on a TV, open documents from OneDrive, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint, and remember the documents last worked on whatever the device^[6]