Microsoft Office for iPad Apps Add Printing Capabilities

Following years of speculation, Microsoft finally unleashed a trio of Office apps on iPad a few weeks back, with Word for iPad, Excel for iPad, and PowerPoint for iPad all offering good-to-great touch-enabled takes on the long-running productivity favorites.

Curiously, though, all three launched without printing support, which made them not-fully-ideal options for users looking to untether from a traditional computer. Luckily, that oversight has been swiftly corrected, as Microsoft announced today via its Office blog that all three apps can now print over the air to any AirPrint-compatible printer.

According to the post, you can now print in all three apps without paying for the Office 365 subscription ($6.99/month minimum), which is needed to actually create and edit documents. Otherwise, the apps offer little more than viewing capabilities without an active subscription.

Microsoft made a couple of other smaller (but still meaningful) updates to its Office for iPad apps today, adding SmartGuides to PowerPoint to help users align their objects on slides, and AutoFit capabilities to Excel to adjust the width or height of multiple respective rows or columns at once. Bug fixes and other behind-the-scenes improvements have also been made to the suite’s apps.