Microsoft has updated its suite of Office apps for iPad to bring it more in line with its desktop counterpart. The 1.1 update brings several key changes to each app, making each one more flexible and easier to use with the iPad's touchscreen interface.
The Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps now let you export and email documents as PDFs, use third-party fonts and crop photos you've inserted into documents, but Excel 1.1 and Powerpoint 1.1 have a few additional changes unique to each app.
Excel 1.1, for example, now supports external keyboards and pivot tables and more paper sizes and scaling options when printing workbooks. The new Flick-to-Select feature also makes selecting multiple cells much easier, as you can simply flick a cell's selection handle in any direction to select the entire row or column.
Meanwhile, PowerPoint 1.1 now let you play videos, sounds and music in presentations, as well as insert videos from your iPad's Camera Roll. It also supports hyperlinks within presentations and lets you erase highlights and drawings from a presentation.
The biggest PowerPoint 1.1 update, though, comes with Presentation Mode, which lets you view and edit notes, preview upcoming slides or jump to different points in your presentation all while you're running and projecting a presentation.
OneNote for iPad has also been updated, although the note-taking app has been available on Apple's tablet for signficantly longer than the other three Office applications. The biggest changes include being able to lock or unlock protected sections of documents created using the desktop version of OneNote, and copy & paste formatted text between applications.
Each Office for iPad app is available to download through the iTunes app store directly from your iPad. Although the apps are free to download and anyone can use them to view Word, PowerPoint and Excel files, you'll need an Office 365 subscription in order to create or edit files.
