Overall, the free software is good for light editing and note taking. For instance, Office for Android lets you edit and create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations from smartphones and tablets without any restrictions.
In Excel, you can search, filter and perform five simple mathematical functions. You can open existing PowerPoint files and edit slide text, but you can't create new presentations.
At the announcement event, Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella said the company is committed to making its cloud services available across all platforms. But the company wasn't always so open to make the Office suite – one of its main cash cows – available to Android and iOS users.
Nadella said the company is well positioned to usher in "the magical coming together of the cloud and mobile" for the roughly 1.5 billion smartphones, computers and tablets sold each year. His reference was to software applications hosted on remote computers, rather than a user's own device.
Microsoft already offers cross-platform device management to enterprise users with Windows Server, System Center and Windows Intune.
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