Office for iPad now has mouse and trackpad support

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all supported

by Tom Warren

Oct 26, 2020, 6:53 PM UTC

An iPad Pro with 2020 Magic Keyboard. The keyboard is black and quite flat. It has a trackpad below it. Above, a hinge connects to a stand that hinges at the iPad’s back and holds it suspended above the keyboard. It looks precarious.

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Tom Warren is a senior correspondent and author of Notepad, who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years.

Microsoft is bringing mouse and trackpad support to its Office for iPad apps today. The software maker promised it would update its Office iPadOS apps earlier this year, and the updates are now live in the App Store for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Office for iPad now lets you use the built-in trackpad on Apple’s Magic Keyboard to navigate around text, photos, and other objects in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The cursor is context aware, like other apps that have taken advantage of the Magic Keyboard, so you can highlight text in Word, resize images and charts in PowerPoint, and select multiple cells in Excel. It’s very similar to using Office on a PC or Mac.

Office for iPad cursor support.

Image: Microsoft

Alongside the mouse and trackpad support, Microsoft is also adding more Fluent UI to its Office for iPad apps. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all have refreshed start screens and a new ribbon of feature menus.

Microsoft is also planning to bring multiple document support to Excel, better contextual menus, and offline file support for cloud files in the coming months. This latest mouse and keyboard support is starting to roll out today and “should reach all users within a couple weeks.”

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