Microsoft launches Office Mobile for iOS

Microsoft has launched an Office app, Office Mobile for iOS, directed at Office 365 users.

The app optimised for use on the iPhone 5, is free to download, although it requires a subscription to the cloud-based Office 365 product to run.

With the app, consumers would be able to open and edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on the move, from practically anywhere.

The iOS offering quite similar to the Office app, currently on Windows Phone 8, means that the full range of capabilities available in the desktop version of Office would not be accessible.

Users, would instead have the ability to make quick edits to Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.

They would also be able to create Word and Excel files through the mobile app, not PowerPoint documents though.

Office files viewed recently on a user's computer would automatically appear in the Recent Documents panel on the mobile app, and users would be able to continue editing documents from where they left off on a computer.

"Documents look like the originals, thanks to support for charts, animations, SmartArt graphics and shapes," reads the App Store description. "When you make quick edits or add comments to a document, the formatting and content remain intact."

Meanwhile, according to Mark Hachman writing in PC World, few people actually opened and edited documents on their smart phones, let alone actually creating them there. He goes on to state that from a short-term perspective, a version of Microsoft Office on Apple's iPhone might not be such a big deal in that context.

He writes, the ''free'' Office Mobile for iPhone app only worked with an Office 365 subscription, so users would need to pay to edit Office documents, whether an Office 365 subscription or Apple's own $9.99 productivity apps, iWork. Also, Office Mobile was specifically formatted for the iPhone, so iPad users would not be able to use it.

Office Mobile for iPhone users would only allow opening and editing of documents, not their creation in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, although a Microsoft-supplied graphic showed the other standalone apps available for the iPhone: Lync, SharePoint, Yammer, and Skype.

According to some analysts, from a broader perspective, Office Mobile for the iPhone represented a foothold by Microsoft onto the broader iOS platform, which represented an opportunity to push Microsoft's idea of Office wherever, for users.