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Four months ago we released Office for iPad—the world’s best productivity experience reimagined for a mobile-first, cloud-first world. Since then millions of you have had the chance to use Office for iPad and provide feedback, and we’ve been hard at work delivering updates for the things you’ve asked for the most. Today we’re sharing the next wave of updates to Office for iPad. We’ve done a ton of work and we hope you like it.
PowerPoint: Presenter View, audio and video playback, and more
With this release, you can enable Presenter View when projecting to another screen, so that you can see your notes, what’s coming next, and more. You asked for this. Now you’ve got it.
Presenter View in PowerPoint for iPad
With this update you can also make your presentations more rich and interactive than ever by more easily including video and sound to help get your point across. Not only do all of your embedded videos and sound recordings now play right from PowerPoint for iPad, but you can insert video directly from your Camera Roll as well. This allows you to quickly record, embed, and present interactive content more quickly than ever, and all from one device.
Playing video directly from PowerPoint for iPad
But that’s not all. There are also new eraser and pen settings to make annotations during presentations easier than ever. You can also edit hyperlinks right from within the app, another way using PowerPoint for iPad is now easier.
Excel: interaction with PivotTables, easier grid navigation, and more
Excel is all about interacting with, consuming, and manipulating your data. When it comes to interacting with data, PivotTables are key to helping explore that data. With Excel for iPad you can now sort, filter, expand and collapse, show details, and even refresh PivotTables whose data is all contained within the workbook. You can even change how your PivotTables look and feel by changing both their visual style and layout.
Sorting a column in a PivotTable in Excel for iPad
We’ve also made it easier to consume workbooks and select data, including a large data range, with the introduction of a new flick gesture. Simply grab the selection handle, flick it in any direction, and Excel will automatically select from where you started to the next blank cell. Say you’re at the top of a column of data and want to select all the way to the bottom. Just flick down and the column is selected automatically.
When it comes to manipulating data, we know that many of you want to be able to do that with hardware keyboards. Excel has lots of behaviors we’ve built up over decades to make working with a keyboard as easy and efficient as possible. Some of these make it easy to navigate around within a cell you are editing using the arrow keys (called Edit mode), and some make it easy to enter formulas without using the mouse (called Point mode). There are also keyboard shortcuts (F2 in Windows, CTRL+U on Mac) that allow you to switch between modes.
All of this is usually completely transparent to you—Excel just works the way it’s supposed to! And now Excel for iPad does too. We’ve even added in a CTRL+2 shortcut key for advanced users to switch between the modes.
We also made some improvements to the print capability we announced in April that make using Excel in Office for iPad easier. We added more paper sizes to choose from, and we added in scaling options. These improvements give you more control over the layout of your workbooks when you choose to print them.
But wait, there’s more!
Last but not least, with this wave of updates to Office for iPad we added three top feature requests that affect all of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
First up is Send as PDF. Send as to PDF is available in the Share menu in all of our apps, and it’s available for everyone to use, whether you have an Office 365 subscription or not.
Send as PDF in Word for iPad
We also introduced new tools to help you edit your pictures from within Office for iPad. When you tap a picture you now see two new options: Crop and Reset. Crop lets you do exactly what it sounds like: crop your picture. You can do this manually, using your finger to set exactly the range you’d like to crop to, or you can select from a menu of popular options. Reset allows you to quickly remove all styles and other changes from your pictures, in case you want to start over.
Cropping a photo in Word for iPad
Finally, Office for iPad now supports third-party fonts! If you use one of several apps to install fonts on your iPad (for example, AnyFont), Office for iPad will now recognize and allow you to use those fonts in any documents you create.
Download the updated Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for today
As this wave of updates hopefully shows, we’re making good on our commitment to delivering continuous updates and improvements to the Office for iPad apps. Download the updated Word, Excel and PowerPoint for iPad in the App Store today. If you want to edit and create documents with your iPad, get started with an Office 365 subscription or a 30-day trial, sign-up at www.Office365.com.