I’m at ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago right now, and the big news on Thursday was that Microsoft released a version of Word (and Excel, and PowerPoint) for the iPad. I have been kicking the tires on this app since it was released Thursday afternoon, and I am incredibly impressed. Unlike Microsoft Office Mobile for iPhone released last year, the new Word app for the iPad has virtually every feature that lawyers want to use. Every attorney who uses an iPad will want to get this app. [UPDATE: Click here for my full review of Microsoft Word for iPad.]
Unlike the iPhone app released last year, this app works great with track changes (redline edits). You can view redline edits, you can create your own redline edits, and you can control how they display (inline with text or off to the side). The app also displays footnotes. And unlike some of the other apps that can revise Word documents, this app seems to preserve formatting. Thus, someone can email you a document, you can read and edit the document, and then you can send it back to them, all using your iPad and not a computer.
So far, my only complaint with Word for iPad is that while it it easy to get a file into the app, it is difficult to get files out. You can open a Word document attached to an email by simply holding down your finger on it to see the “Open in” menu and then selecting the Word app. But once a file is in Word for iPad, you can only save it (to your iPad or to your Microsoft OneDrive) and the only way to get the document out of the app is to email it. You cannot choose to “Open in” another app, nor can you print, nor can you save to DropBox, Box, or any of the other cloud storage services. As a workaround, you can email to yourself, and from there you can work with the attachment to your self-directed email.
Anyone can download the app for free and use it to view Word files, and if you have an Office 365 subscription ($100 a year) you can edit and save files. The release of this app is going to cause a huge number of attorneys to purchase Office 365 accounts. And all of the third party apps that we have been using for years to view Word documents are going to have to find ways to distinguish themselves. For example, Reader 7 does a great job of displaying your document full screen, an option not in the current version of Word for iPad.
I haven’t started looking at the new Excel and PowerPoint apps for iPad, but my hope is that they are as good as Word for iPad.
Kudos to Microsoft for releasing such an amazing iPad app that every attorney is going to want to have.
Click here to get Microsoft Word for iPad (free): 
There is another way to get your files out of Word other than email. If you asave to Microsoft OneDrive, you can then use the open in feature in OneDrive to get your file into other apps. I agree it is silly for Microsoft not to include that feature natively, but at least you can do it with OneDrive. I hope future versions add the option to word, as well as an export to PDF feature.
Great idea, Steven. For anyone who’s interested, there is another workaround as well — if you have an office or home PC that is generally turned on:
If you nest your OneDrive folder inside your Dropbox folder (or vice versa), all of the files will be sync’d together. So, for example, I have placed my OneDrive folder inside my Dropbox folder. Then I placed all of my documents folders in my OneDrive folder. When I make a change in Word for iPad, it saves the changes to my OneDrive account. My PC sync’s those changes immediately and, in turn, sync’s with Dropbox. Now all of my files are accessible in all of my apps through Dropbox AND OneDrive. Plus, it’s a redundant backup if either service is unavailable.
Please note that if you nest OneDrive inside Dropbox, there is a .lock (hidden) file that OneDrive uses to keep things sync’d properly. It’s inaccessible, so Dropbox can’t sync it, and it shows up as an error. (If anyone finds a workaround for this, please let me know!)
As silly as it seems, forcing users to use OneDrive is a great marketing move on Microsoft’s part. With Dropbox, Google Drive, SugarSync, etc. all way ahead of them in the cloud-storage game, this is a good way to get people to use OneDrive. Unless people refuse to adopt Office for iPad without an export feature, I can’t see them ever making it easy to use another service. Ideally, I think we’d all like to see other cloud storage services available natively in these apps, but I’m not holding my breath.
You just made the Judge I work for’s MONTH. You should have seen his face when he was complaining, in preparation for a trip he’s leaving for this afternoon, that his iPad handles PDFs beautifully but none of the available programs really let him work with Word documents, and I told him that Office for iPad had been released in the past few weeks. He purchased Office 365 about 5 minutes later and seems absolutely elated.