Satya Nadella took the stage today for the first time as CEO of Microsoft. The analysts and specialized press had assigned: present Office for iPad. He didn't, but Julia White, the CEO of Microsoft Office, did. The Microsoft office suite will be available from today on the App Store.
Finally, Apple tablet users will be able to make use of Word, Excel and Power Point with original Microsoft software. The interesting thing is that the files will be directly connected and synced in the cloud, this is with One Drive. It will also feature simultaneous collaborative editing y edit record to revert to previous edit versions of your documents.
As has been indicated and we have been able to see, it is not a direct translation of the iPhone application, but rather an application built from the beginning for the tablet format, generating an appropriate experience.
White has given us a tour for the three applications. Of course, it has started with the most popular.
Word for iPad it looks amazing. We have seen how the settings and options are controlled by touch, with adaptation of the menus depending on whether the iOS keyboard is present or not. We have also seen how images were inserted and edited with actions as familiar as pinching.
Excel for iPad glowed with a adapted numeric keypad to your needs and formulas. The charts work with recommendations and we can have a preview and then decide what to insert, directly in the document itself.
With Power Point for iPad we could do real-time slide editing during the presentation to emphasize or dramatize concepts or details.
Each of them is a loose application and can be installed individually.
Freemium model with limitations
Office for iPad will use a freemium model. It will be accessible without subscription but only to view the files. However, if we have an Office 365 subscription we can edit.
This approach will be maintained when the service spread to other platforms, something that they have promised in a generic way, but that we understand that they referred primarily to the Windows 8.1 and then Android.
Azure Active Directory professional environment
We can have a professional profile linked to our Microsoft account that, at the same time, your devices, also mobile. We can manage the professional part of each of our devices centrally from our Azure Active Directory. From there, we can delete from each of these devices, the professional applications that we have linked and all the related information they have. This will also be possible from mobile devices of all platforms.
The Premium service that will give us access to all these functions will be released next April.
Office 365 as a platform
There has also been talk of the opportunity for developers to create applications that use Office 365 as a platform. Being able to develop applications associated with office automation documents and giving us new options for interacting with them. White showed us DocuSign as an example. With it, we can sign documents saved in our Office 365 account and they will be automatically synchronized with OneDrive. The possibilities are many and they want to make things easy for developers.
His idea is to bring these services to everyone regardless of the type of device they use and the platform to which it belongs. So the slogan for this first Nadella lecture was A cloud for everyone, on every devicewhat does he come to say a cloud for everyone, on any device. All these possibilities and the future of its cloud services will be discussed extensively next week at BUILD, where the CEO of Microsoft will speak again.
Update: applications are now available for download in the App Store.