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Microsoft releases Office apps for iPhone, makes basic editing features free

Office-iPhone-apps-02

Microsoft announced today that it’s rolling out standalone Office apps for iPhone after releasing the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps exclusively for iPad earlier this year. Microsoft previously had an “Office Mobile” app for iPhone that integrated features of all three Office apps, but today’s release of standalone Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps for iPhone are officially replacing Office Mobile as Microsoft’s Office solution for iPhone.

Microsoft is also delivering updates for the Office iPad apps that include new features along with the ability to create and edit for free. The ability to edit previously required a paid subscription to Office 365. The company also said the updates make sure the apps offer “a consistently beautiful and productive Office experience on every device.” The apps are also getting Dropbox support, something the companies announced earlier this week.

The new Office apps for iPhone and iPad are available as universal downloads starting today— Word, Excel, PowerPoint— and available in 29 languages and 136 countries.

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Comments

  1. Tony De Raat - 9 years ago

    Coolio – But no Powerpoint for iPhone at this stage :(

  2. Spencer Morse - 9 years ago

    Great, I don’t care. When are we getting Office 2015, damnit!?!?

  3. Looks like Microsoft continues down the path of Software Company instead of a Window company. Which is good thing. There’s a lot of gold in them there hills. Just ask Adobe.

  4. robertvarga79 - 9 years ago

    The important and not told detail would have been: how many/what kind of editing features/total features come for free?!

    • Zero tools come free. I would have paid $10 per just to have a working version that didn’t require a monthly subscription. They are pushing me further into Apple’s eco-system everyday :(

  5. golfersal - 9 years ago

    It’s really sad, last year when office for IOS came out, they had a day in which they gave out free access for Office 365, so that you could use Office for IOS without a fee.
    I went to the Microsoft store last March and got one of the 200 free access tickets, activate it but you know what, to this day I have still have not used Office on my Ipad. Matter of fact, I never downloaded or used my free access to Office 365.
    The point of this, people have moved on, we aren’t using and we don’t need Office for the Mac anymore, Microsoft has screwed up another market and we have moved on to other products.

    • So what your saying is because you don’t use Office 365, the whole Mac community doesn’t? Highly arrogant to think that your software habits are the yardstick which we all use to measure isn’t it.

      • golfersal - 9 years ago

        No, I’m not saying that.
        There are a lot of folks that are paying for Office 365, mainly because they deal with folks in the window world and Microsoft office is the way to go for most of them. Also for many they have used Office so many years they are very comfortable with the product.
        What I am saying, Microsoft Office has been around the Mac community just as long as the Mac, and especially the last ten years since Safari came out, Microsoft seems to only unpdate our product once ever three or four years. They have done a really poor job in keeping their share of the market place.
        In 2004, Microsoft Office was a really big deal in the eyes of many in the Mac world including myself. We now have a dozen choices of other packages that we can use, some of them with no cost involved.
        Same with the iPhone and IPad, there are a lot of other packages that are good to use. We have seen these folks devote a lot of time and effort, we get support for these products and they come out with updates.
        You think that we are going to see the same with Microsoft Office??? They have a track record and that is being very lazy and only updating things every four years or so and I bet that they are very close to plugging the plug on the Macintosh Marketplace.

  6. Mr. Grey (@mister_grey) - 9 years ago

    Yet another thing I predicted comes true. :-) It was obvious this was going to happen from the first minute Office was offered on iOS.

    It’s a bad thing for people who enjoy good software, but an obvious good move for Microsoft. The “free” editing gets people using it, then eventually they sign up for the subscription product. The only real question is why did it take them so long to see this and implement it?

    There are literally tens of thousands of dummies out there that think “Someone gave me a Word file, so I need to get Word to open it.” There are many, many more that are aware of the existence of other options but are just too damn lazy to bother.

    • There’s nothing to “use” for free, it’s simply a viewer, nothing else. I won’t sign up for a monthly subscription with their insecure cloud. I would have gladly paid $10 per app, but now I’m stuck moving further and further into the Apple eco-system.

  7. orress39 - 9 years ago

    Sir, What about Mac air?

    Srinivasan

    >

Author

Avatar for Jordan Kahn Jordan Kahn

Jordan writes about all things Apple as Senior Editor of 9to5Mac, & contributes to 9to5Google, 9to5Toys, & Electrek.co. He also co-authors 9to5Mac’s Logic Pros series.