Microsoft Office for the iPad is coming soon, Ballmer

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has let slip that Microsoft Office for the iPad is on its way, although it's unlikely to arrive any time soon. Ballmer revealed that Microsoft is developing a version of Microsoft Office for the iPad.

He said, "Word, PowerPoint and Excel are all authoring tools. They are optimized for use with keyboards and mice. The last time I checked, the iPad didn't have a paradigm for keyboard or mice.

"The iPad will be picked up when we do what I would call not just a touch-enabled, but a touch-first user interface for Office. That is in progress for both Windows 8 and other platforms."

While there's already an iPhone version of Microsoft Office available, this is the first time the company has mentioned developing it for Apple's iPad, despite it having long been called for by users of the tablet.

However, as Ballmer's comments suggest, it seems Microsoft is plotting to bring touchscreen friendly Office apps to its own Windows 8 operating system first, likely to make its Surface tablets more appealing to buyers.

Ballmer didn't reveal any more details about the upcoming Microsoft Office applications, nor did he drop hints about a release date. However, if speculation is to believed, Microsoft Office for the iPad is likely to arrive in early 2014.

According to analysts, the firm should release the applications sooner rather than later though, with Morgan Stanley researcher Adam Holt claiming earlier this year that the firm has missed out on "billions of dollars" by not releasing Microsoft Office for the iPad.

Microsoft plans to changes Office 365 targeted at SharePoint Online users

Microsoft wants to improve the way they upload and store documents in the cloud collaboration server to prevent SharePoint Online customers from feeling boxed in.

Over the coming weeks, Microsoft will roll out a set of changes to Office 365 targeted at SharePoint Online users, including increasing from 250MB to 2GB the size of files that people can upload to their individual Sky-Drive Pro repositories and to SharePoint Online team site document libraries, the company said on Thursday in a blog post.

The enhancements are in response to companies' increased use of Office 365, according to the blog post's author, Mark Kashman. "Users are uploading more documents to Sky-Drive Pro, teams are building numerous team sites to work with internal teams as well as with external customers and partners, and companies are establishing their corporate intranet sites," he wrote.

In addition to lifting the size limit on individual uploads, Microsoft has expanded the types of files that can be uploaded by adding .exe and .dll files.

Another change will be to increase from 3,000 to 10,000 the number of site collections -- groups of websites organized hierarchically -- that an Office 365 Enterprise customer can create. This improvement will not be applied to Office 365 Small Business and Midsize Business customers.

Microsoft is also prolonging the time that discarded documents remain in SharePoint Online recycle bins from 30 days to 90 days to give users more chance to recover these items. In addition, retaining multiple versions of Office 365 documents will be on by default on newly created SkyDrive Pro libraries.

Thursday's announcement comes shortly after Microsoft increased SkyDrive Pro storage from 7GB to 25GB and doubled the size of Exchange Online mailboxes to 50GB.

Microsoft is in a dogfight with Google, as Office 365 and Google Apps battle for customers large and small that are looking to move their email, calendaring, office apps and other collaboration and productivity tools to a vendor-hosted public cloud service.