Apple added preliminary iPad mouse support in 2019, and I found it to be very useful, but also somewhat frustrating because it seemed so limited with the cursor merely mimicking your finger without working like a mouse attached to a computer. On March 24, 2020, Apple added fantastic mouse and trackpad support to the iPad when it released iPad OS 13.4. For the first time, the iPad had true cursor support, like a computer. And in fact, it was even better than a computer because the cursor could change its shape and function depending upon what your cursor was over. The only drawback was that individual apps needed to add support for these advanced features, so it still felt somewhat incomplete. But to be honest, there was really only one app for which I really wanted to see this advanced mouse and trackpad support: Microsoft Word.
On October 26, 2020, Microsoft announced that full support was coming "within a couple weeks." Well, I guess everything took longer in 2020, but yesterday the Microsoft Word for iPad app was finally updated to add full trackpad and mouse support. And I have good news: it works great.
Connect a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse (or trackpad) to your iPad, and you are ready to go. When you move your cursor around the text portion of a Microsoft Word document, the cursor changes to an I-beam, much like you would see when using Microsoft Word on a computer.
I find that using a mouse in Microsoft Word on the iPad is an easier, faster, and more precise way to select text as compared to using your finger. It works exactly the way that you would expect it to work.
When you move your cursor over one of the tools at the top, the shape of the cursor changes to indicate what will be selected if you click when your cursor is at that spot. For example, if you hover your cursor over a tab, it changes to the shape of the entire tab:
If you hover your cursor over a formatting tool, such as the "B" that formats text in bold, your cursor changes to the shape of that tool:
If you own Apple's Magic Keyboard for iPad, which has a built-in trackpad, that device plus your iPad give you an incredibly powerful portable word processor for working with Word documents. But even if you don't want to spend $290 for that device (or $330 for the larger version for the 12.9" iPad Pro), you can use any Bluetooth keyboard and any Bluetooth mouse with an iPad. Or, if you have an iPad Pro, and if you have a USB-C hub that has a USB port on it — I use the HyperDrive 6-in-1 USB-C Hub (my review), but you can also use something less expensive such as this $19 adapter from Apple or this $8.50 adapter from Amazon Basics — you can even plug in any wired mouse to the iPad. And surely you have one of those around somewhere. I even hooked up a wired Kensington trackball to my iPad Pro and it worked great with this new version of Word. If you have an iPad with a Lightning port, you can connect a USB device by using a Lightning-to-USB adapter such as this one.
Whether you use a trackpad or a mouse, wireless or corded, the Microsoft Word app on the iPad is now significantly better as a result of this update. I wish that it had come sooner — I definitely would have taken advantage of this when I was working from home every day during the pandemic in 2020 — but it is here now, and it works really well.
