Microsoft has finally brought an official Office Mobile app to the iPhone, launching Microsoft Office Mobile on the Apple App Store today.
An official Office app for iPhone has been rumoured for a long, long time now, yet for some reason Microsoft launched it without any fanfare or applause earlier today. The app slipped onto the App Store and is now ready and waiting to be downloaded.
Unfortunately you’ll need an Office 365 subscription in order to make use of Office Mobile for iPhone – from around $4/£5 per month – but once you have that you’re good to go. Excel and Word files can be created completely from scratch and then saved either locally on your iPhone or to the cloud with Microsoft SkyDrive. Alternatively you can open, view and edit PowerPoint and other Office documents, then save and share on the go.
If you’ve recently opened up a file and closed it then it will be cached for viewing and editing offline, so even if you don’t have Wi-Fi or mobile data you can continue with your work.
Those with Office 2013 on a Windows PC will also be able to remotely access any recent files used and saved on there with the mobile app, although it’s not yet clear whether changes made using the mobile app will be shown on Office 2013 for PC.
Office Mobile is available now from the App Store for iPhone and iPod Touch, provided you’re running iOS 6.1. Unfortunately for us Brits, the app is currently only available is the US. There’s also no iPad version – yet.