Today Microsoft announced the release of Office for iPad (Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote). We are often asked by our clients about using tablets instead of laptops for getting their work done, and the lack of MS Office applications is usually where it falls down.

If these new apps are any good, then lots of the people we work with (hey, even myself included) could find themselves a significant step closer to using their iPad for all their computing requirements when away from the office.

I haven’t had a chance to use them yet (they are downloading right now!), but some of the press have had advanced access, and it sounds good.

Ed Bott at ZDNet

Make no mistake about it: These three apps are feature-rich, powerful tools for creating and editing Office documents. They look and act like their Office 2013 counterparts on Windows. And although these iPad apps obviously can’t replicate every feature of the full desktop programs, they deliver an impressive subset of those features. Anyone who was expecting Office Lite or a rehash of theunderwhelming Office for iPhone will be pleasantly surprised.

I do have one concern though – Microsoft seems to be using the iPad version of Office as another way to push people to Office 365. Up to now we have continued to recommend the full version of Office to most of our clients (especially charities who are eligible for discounts from TTX). The vast majority of the people we work with need Outlook, Word and Excel, a few need PowerPoint. Very few need the extra apps that come with the Professional version of Office. With Office 365 Business costing about £100 per year, if you buy the full Home and Business version and use it for two years you’re better off.

To try and add some additional value to Office 365, Microsoft have included some extra bells and whistles. Office for iPad is now one of these. The apps are free to download, but you need an Office 365 subscription to unlock their full functionality (i.e. the ability to create documents). Also the iPad versions access data from the bundled OneDrive cloud storage (typically we recommend Dropbox for cloud storage).

So it remains to be seen how Office for iPad will work for us and for the types of business we work with. But it’s certainly a step in the inevitable dominance tablets are going to have in the future of mobile computing.