Microsoft rolls out Office for iPad updates
Third-party fonts, PDF exporting, and a new gesture are among the improvements to the iOS editions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Good news for Office for iPad users: Microsoft's suite of apps continues to inch closer to its desktop counterpart. The company today rolled out updates to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for iOS, bringing a small but welcome set of improvements to the tablet versions of these apps.
Word 1.1, for instance, now supports these three features:
- You can export and email documents as PDFs.
- You can crop photos you've inserted into your documents.
- You can use third-party fonts.
Excel for iPad also inherited the send-to-PDF, cropping, and font options (as did PowerPoint 1.1), along with these updates:
- Flick-to-select! Flick a cell's selection handle in any direction to select all the data in that row or column.
- Support for external keyboards.
- Support for Pivot Tables.
- Support for more paper sizes and scaling options when printing workbooks.
Finally, PowerPoint received perhaps the biggest updates of all, starting with Presentation Mode, which lets you view and edit notes, preview the next slide, and jump to other slides, all while running (and projecting) a presentation. Also in version 1.1:
- The option to play videos, sounds, and music during a presentation.
- Support for videos inserted from the Camera Roll.
- Support for hyperlinks within presentations.
- The option to erase highlights and drawings in a presentation.
If you're already an Office for iPad user, what are your thoughts on these additions? What other features would you like to see down the road?