Office has been in the news a lot recently, and there was a great deal of excited surrounding the arrival of Microsoft’s office suite on iPad. While Office is very much a cross-platform tool, there have been grumbles of discontent that Microsoft’s own Windows RT and touchscreen devices seem to have been neglected. Now this comes to an end. At Build today, a touch-optimized version of Office was previewed, giving a tantalizing glimpse of what’s to come.
All of the usual suspects are accounted for, and the look of Office has changed very little from other platforms’ versions. Unsurprisingly, there is integration with OneDrive and by automatically saving document to Microsoft cloud storage service, it is possible to offer an unlimited level of undos.
As this is a touch-friendly version of Office, there is support for standard gestures such as pinch-to-zoom as well as stylus support complete with a range of different pen styles. This is also one of the apps that take advantage of Microsoft’s universal Windows apps idea.
At the moment there is no word on a release date, but hopefully it won’t be long before we know a little more.
Further reading: Build 2014, Office 365
