If you use Office and would like to make an iPad your laptop replacement, then this is what you’ve been waiting for. In a blog post announcing new updates, Microsoft showed them off in use with the new iPad Air.

Bill Doll, Sr. Product Marketing Manager - Office Apps Strategy at Microsoft, stated in his blog yesterday: "We know the Office experience on iPad is an important tool for the many people who use it to work, learn and create. The latest iPad Pro, iPad Air and iPad models have introduced powerful new features and capabilities to enable people to be productive in more ways. Accordingly, we have made several updates to the Office apps to take advantage of these enhancements and make it even easier to work on iPad.

This spring, Apple added mouse and trackpad support to the iPad with a software update, and ever since then, users with business to take care of have been waiting for Microsoft’s Office suite to include the feature.

Trackpad and Mouse Support

The Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps are now receiving updates to take full advantage of trackpad support in iPadOS to give iPad users using a mouse or Apple’s new Magic Keyboard easy cursor control, fluid navigation, and precise adjustments. When moving a finger across the built-in trackpad of Magic Keyboard, the cursor transforms into the tool you need depending on the content you’re pointing to. And using a mouse or trackpad with iPad for common tasks like highlighting a passage of text in Word, selecting a range of cells in Excel, and moving and resizing graphics in PowerPoint are as simple and intuitive as ever.

This experience will be immediately familiar to anyone who has ever used Office on a Mac or a PC and helps make iPad even more versatile and capable for getting more work done. 

Many users have already started receiving these updates through a phased roll-out, which should reach all users within a couple weeks.

These updates are just the latest in a series of improvements we continue to make to the Office experience designed to take advantage of the unique capabilities of iPad, such as its large Multi-Touch display, and versatile accessories, including the ability to open multiple documents in Word and PowerPoint, the new keyboard shortcuts which were released this summer and fall, and additional updates which you will see over the next few months such as multiple document support in Excel, powerful contextual menus, and offline file support for cloud files. For more, read the full Microsoft Blog entry.