Finally! Microsoft Office is now available for iPad users.

At a press event in San Francisco, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the availability of Office for iPad to expand its cloud services to mobile devices.

“Microsoft is focused on delivering the cloud for everyone, on every device. It’s a unique approach that centers on people — enabling the devices you love, work with the services you love, and in a way that works for IT and developers,” said Nadella.

You can now download the Office for iPad app for free.  It offers Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, so you can go crazy creating Word documents, spreadsheets, and powerpoint presentations on the go, but there’s a huge catch – you need to have an Office 365 subscription to do that.  The app is free, the service not so much.

What you can do with the free app is read your Word documents, view your Excel data and present with PowerPoint.  If you want to create or edit documents, you need a subscription.  The subscription also allows you to access all your documents on any device, even on the go, as documents are saved on OneDrive and OneDrive for Business, Microsoft’s cloud offerings.

Aside from the Office for iPad app, Microsoft also offers other iPad-optimized productivity applications such as OneNote, Dynamics CRM, Dynamics AX, Bing, Lync, Outlook Web Access, OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, Yammer and Skype.

Microsoft launched its Office Mobile for Office 365 subscribers last year for iPhone users, but there’s only so much you can do on a device with such a limiting screen size.  With the iPad version, it will be easier to create or edit documents and view presentations.

Microsoft also announced the new Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite to help IT departments find an economical way to manage and integrate the various devices used by employees.  It includes Windows Intune, Azure Active Directory Premium and Azure Rights Management Services, giving ITs the tools they need to protect corporate data while allowing people to use the device of their choice.

photo: Drnantu via photopin cc