Microsoft Office for Android tablets is now out of preview, bringing Microsoft’s vision of ‘Office everywhere’ a little closer to fruition. As of today Word, Excel and PowerPoint will be available for downloads for free in the Google Store, Microsoft reported on an official blog.  The Redmond company today also announced a new Outlook for iOS and also a preview version of Outlook for Android.

The preview of Office for Android was a raging success, says Microsoft, earning a 4+ rating and generating more than “250 thousand downloads of the Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps across 33 languages and more than 110 countries, helping us refine and improve the product.” The company says it’s “only scratched the surface” with the two releases in terms of reaching its mobile-first, cloud-first objectives. The only conditions are that users have at least a 7 inch tablet (1GB of RAM or more) that runs Android 4.4 KitKat (or newer), and that they also have an ARM-based processor.

However, to create, edit and print files you’ll need to sign-in to a Microsoft Account, while to access premium features, such as the Presenter View in PowerPoint ,or tracking changes in Word, you’ll need an Office 365 subscription, which will set you back at least $6.99. The same applies for users with a tablet 10.1 inches or bigger.

Early reports of the Office apps by Engadget report that the home screen on all the apps is pretty much the same and that the functions and layout for all the apps also share the same interface. As for the benefits of touchscreen Engadget wrote, “the ability to doodle and draw circles right on the PowerPoint slide with your finger is pretty great”, and while working in Excel resizing tables and dealing with spreadsheets using the touch interface was unproblematic.

Microsoft is hoping for the same success it has had with its Office for iOS, which, Microsoft reported today, has already hit 80 million downloads of its apps.

Photo credit: Microsoft