You can get Microsoft Office on your iPad or iPhone - and you don't even have to pay. We explain how to view and edit Word, Excel & Powerpoint documents in iOS.
If you’re looking to work on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents on your iPad or iPhone without signing up for a full Microsoft 365 subscription, we’re here to help. In this article, we will discuss how to install the Microsoft Office apps on an iPad, including how you can get them for free, whether you should, as well as some alternatives.
When Microsoft first unveiled its Office apps for Mac and iOS devices, the apps were quite limited. The iPad version offered some basic editing features (but only to Office 365 subscribers), while the iPhone equivalent was read-only. But these days most iPad and iPhone users can access and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents on their phones and tablets.
Read on for more information about how to get Office apps on your iPhone and iPad, and how to make the most of their features. For related advice, see our Office for Mac buying guide.
The iOS and iPadOS Microsoft Office apps are each free to download from the App Store (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook) as well as the full Office Suite. (They require a device running iOS 16 or later.) If you run a search in the App Store rather than using the links above, make sure you get versions with Microsoft Corporation listed as the developer so you don’t accidentally download an Office clone or related app.
To do anything with the apps, you will need to have a Microsoft account. You don’t need to have a paid Office 365 subscription to log in, but Microsoft requires you to register for an account to use the app. After logging in, you can create, edit, view, and print documents, presentations, and spreadsheets in the Office apps for free, but without a full subscription, features are very limited.
With Office 365 you get premium versions of Office applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook—including advanced change tracking, the removal of limits on the ways you can use paragraph styles, and advanced chart, table, and picture formatting tools. Plus you get 1TB of online storage per person with OneDrive (without a subscription to Office 365 you only get 5GB). Users can also open existing documents stored on their OneDrive or any other SharePoint location.
A yearly Office 365 subscription starts at £59.99 in the U.K. or £5.99 per month for Personal, and at $69.99 in the U.S. or $6.99 per month. Depending on the subscription you could get the Office apps for your Mac too. This is for a single license and is good across all platofrms: PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Android phones and tablets.
You’ll find full details of the extra features unlocked with a 365 subscription, plus the various tiers on offer, at the Microsoft Office website. The apps are app regularly updated, but Microsoft has confirmed that a new version of Office is coming later in 2024, the first since 2021.
