Hell froze over: Microsoft has made its mobile Office apps free to use on iPhone, iPad, and soon Android tablets.

As of Thursday, Nov. 6, if you have any device running iOS 7, you can download Word, Excel and PowerPoint for free. And you can actually edit, save, and use the basic functions you need without buying an Office 365 subscription.


It's part of Microsoft's new "Office Everywhere, For Everyone" mantra, under which the company has broken the mostly useless Office Mobile app into the three stand-alone apps, designed specifically for the iPhone's screen. Microsoft also updated the iPad versions and has said it will release Android editions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint designed for tablet-sized screens.

The new mobile Office apps for iPhone are nothing like the "read only" non-subscription Office for iPhone released last year -- in that you can actually use them like productivity apps.

But the apps' UI features are familiar, which is a good thing: the bottom quick menu is streamlined and perfect for small screens, putting most of the font, formatting, styles, layout and insert options you're likely to need just a couple of clicks away.

The iPad version (and presumably, the Android tablet edition) keeps the UI consistent while taking advantage of more screen space.

In all versions of the mobile Office apps, you'll be able to create documents, open and edit existing ones, and send or save them to your device or the cloud (including the recently partnered-with Dropbox).

You'll need to sign into a Microsoft account before you get started, but it's free and easy to create -- plus it comes with OneDrive cloud storage for saving across your mobile devices. And although this means yet another account to keep track of, it's not an Office 365 account, so these features are free to use.

"Free to use" is a loaded term, of course, since Microsoft is actually switching from it's famous exclusivity to a "freemium" strategy, hoping to gain new Office 365 subscribers from those free users wishing to unlock premium-only features -- which are not identified as such and embedded throughout Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Sneaky? Yes.

But in practice (after using Word for a full workday), all of the essentials are free. Only very specific options -- like advanced table formatting and custom colors for heading styles -- brought up the premium lock message.

In fact, if you find yourself stumbling into Microsoft's Office 365 sales pitch very often -- without deliberately looking for it -- congratulations! You're officially a power user: You should probably buy a subscription to Office 365. Otherwise, just wait until you get to your computer, where undoubtedly there's a copy of Office installed.

Besides being incredibly convenient (and free!), the release of these apps for Apple devices signal that Microsoft has truly changed its tune.

Since the early days of software, Office has pretty much always been the top choice in professional-quality productivity suites. And Microsoft -- so innately competitive that it famously bumped up against legislation originally intended to tame the 19th century robber barons -- has pretty much always played games with Office's availability on rival platforms. Especially Apple.

But Microsoft took its first step this year when Office finally came to the iPad, with the inauguration of new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Before that, it took until 2013 before Office, even in its previously limited form, hit any mobile devices not running an operating system owned by Microsoft. That's six years after Office Mobile was first released for Windows smartphones -- and technically 17 years after the first handheld version of Word.

For the average consumer, often victims of platform wars between manufacturers of their various favorite devices and software -- with Office being the most notable, frustrating, and perpetual example -- the time has finally come:

Free at last. Thank God almighty, MS Office is free at last.

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