Microsoft has pushed an update to its Office for iOS that allows users to make the most of the 3D Touch feature as well as the Apple Pencil.
With the update, Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps on the iPhone 6S and the iPhone 6S Plus get enhanced with cool new features such as holding down on the apps to fire quick actions, or ‘Peek’ and ‘Pop’ in Apple-speak. Now, users can easily access the most recent documents or create new ones right from the app icon itself.
While iPad Pro users can also make good use of the Apple Pencil, which allows users to make comments on the documents. There is also the cool new ‘annotate with ink’ feature included in the update that lets users draw, write, or highlights portions of their documents.
The new Office update also saves users from having to search for documents by launching the Word app first. Instead, users can make use of the Apple iOS 9 Spotlight search feature that allows users to search for files and documents saved within Word.
The update also introduces the new Morph feature for PowerPoint that allows users the ability to move several object at the same time. This makes for quick editing and rearrangement of the content on the slides thereby reducing the turnaround time for creating new presentation slides significantly.
The new Office apps can be availed of free from the Apple App Store though users will need to have an Office 365 subscription to unlock all of the cool new features.
These developments are in stark contrast to the days when the Redmond-based company would zealously guard its Office suite of apps from use on any other platform other than Windows. The reasons were obvious, the Microsoft Office happens to be one of the most sought after feature of Windows, and Microsoft had tried its best to lure in more users to its Windows platform using the Office suite.
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Interestingly, thanks to the rapid proliferation of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS in the personal computing space, Microsoft has been forced to retract its position. Things have come to such that the company’s latest and greatest operating system, the Windows 10 is now available free, something that is virtually unthinkable even a couple of years ago.
Further, the Office suite has been turned into a subscription model where users have to subscribe for using the full complement of feature that the software suite comes with. Moreover, in such a scenario, it makes sense to introduce the Office suite in as many devices as possible, even if those run on competing platforms.
