Windows Tablets bundled with MS Office

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Some Windows tablets will be bundled with Microsoft Office for no extra cost.

As a sign that the sales of Windows Tablets are not as good as the Redmond hype, Microsoft has announced that Office software can now be included free with the hardware.

Later this year (not right away) buyers of Windows tablet devices with screens between 7- to 10.1-inch size will get Office 2013 Home and Student Edition (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote) as well. There’s no extra cost for computer makers, so there should be no higher price for consumers.

This will happen when the update to Windows 8 (called Windows 8.1) is rolled out to computer makers and public later this year.

The bundling of Office with Windows 8.1 applies to tablets running on ‘standard’ x86 processors not the ‘RT’ tablets.

Windows RT tablets already come with Office 2013 Home and Student edition and will have an ‘RT’ version of Outlook added later in the year.