Microsoft Office apps get cursor, trackpad support on iPads: Here’s how it will make your work easier

The trackpad via Apple’s Magic Keyboard lets you navigate around text, photos, and other elements placed inside the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps.

Apple iPad (Pexels)

While Apple's iPad already came with mouse and trackpad support, Microsoft is using it as an opportunity to make its Office for iPad apps better. The Office apps will soon support mouse and trackpad as promised before as a part of the update. And these updates are now live on the App Store for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. 

The trackpad via Apple's Magic Keyboard lets you navigate around text, photos, and other elements placed inside the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps. What's more is that the cursor is said to be context aware so it becomes easy to resize and image or select phrases. This also aims to make the experience come close to what we usually get in Office on a PC or Mac.

“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,” says the firm.

In addition, you get updated start screens and a new ribbon of feature menus in Office apps.

However, that's not all. Microsoft confirms that it has some other features lined up for future. “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.”