With all the talk of Windows 10, even Microsoft forgot to promote a major expansion of Office for iPhone and iPad. The Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps for iOS have been updated in a big way but there’s no mention on Microsoft’s own site, not even the usual blog post.
Arabic, Hebrew and Thai are now supported. Arabic is in the top ten languages of the world so that’s over 200 million more potential Office users on Apple devices.
That’s possible because Office for iOS now supports bi-directional and complex script languages. Office for Windows/Mac has been able to do that for years.
Other changes in the v1.11 release are:
- View protected documents: open and view documents that have access permissions applied to them.
- Easier sharing: invite people to edit a document and grant them permissions, all from within the app.
- Integration with Outlook: directly edit a document attached to an Outlook email message.
