Microsoft has made good on its promise to roll out full iPadOS trackpad support to its Office apps for iPad. Microsoft said support for iPadOS trackpad features would arrive this fall, and it announced today that the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps for iPad are now being updated to fulfill that promise.
With full support for the iPadOS cursor, Microsoft says Word, PowerPoint, and Excel are all now ready for Apple’s Magic Keyboard accessory, as well as any other trackpad you connect to your iPad.
Other than iPadOS trackpad support, Microsoft says that today’s updates to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint also bring new start screens and a new ribbon of feature menus:
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 of getting more work done.
Microsoft adds that some users have been receiving these updates over the last several weeks through a “phased rollout,” but that everyone should have the new features within a couple of weeks. You can download Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for iPad on the App Store
enhancements provide a cleaner and more modern user experience which has proven to help people more easily find what they need and focus on the task at hand. These updates reflect the recent design enhancements we’ve been making with our Fluent UI which you’ll see across the Microsoft 365 experience.
