Microsoft’s Office app comes to iPad – combines Word, PowerPoint and Excel into one app

Microsoft has finally released its Office app for iPad. The unified Office app brings all Microsoft productivity apps like Word, PowerPoint and Excel into one app, and also provides quick access to features such as file transfer, PDF signing and scanning, file conversion, text extraction from images, form creation, and much more.

The Office app was first released for iPhone back in 2019. Microsoft steadily kept adding features to the app over time, however, it only released it iPadOS now. If you are an Office 365 user, the app gives you a bird’s eye view and quick access to all your documents, shared documents, and notes, all in one view.

Office app for iPad is now available for download

When you open the Office app, you are greeted with a list of recommended documents, recent documents, and your notes, in one view. You have an option to filter this view by file type, or media type, which makes it a convenient ‘news feed’ for your work.

Tapping the plus button on the bottom right corner brings up quick actions which let you create notes, documents, and use Office Lens to scan documents, QR codes, extract tables from images, and capture whiteboards.

The main feature of the Office app is perhaps its ability to house Word, PowerPoint and Excel, all in one app. You get the full-fledged experience here that you get in the standalone Office apps, including trackpad and mouse support.

Here are the complete release notes from the Office app in App Store:

• Office is now available on iPad: We’re combining the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps you know into a single, iPadOS-optimized app. Plus, you’ll see additional tools to keep you more productive than ever. For example, you’ll be able to quickly create and sign PDFs, and transform pictures into documents.
• Get to Image-based Workflows Readily: Tap ‘Share’ in the phone gallery outside the Office app, to get to several actions like Create PPT, Create PDF and more. In addition, if there are any recent screenshots when you open the Office app, these are surfaced as a suggestion to covert to PDF or PPT.
• Insert date, shape, image and notes in PDF: Now you can easily insert date, shape, image and notes in PDFs using new capabilities

Unfortunately, one drawback of using the Office app instead of dedicated Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps on iPad right now is that the Office app does not support multiple windows. You are stuck with a fullscreen experience which does not give you full advantage of the latest multitasking capabilities offered by iPadOS. Hopefully, this is on Microsoft’s list of upcoming updates for its Office app for iPad.

Download Office for iPad