Thursday 27 March 2014 1:02 pm

Microsoft’s new CEO has revealed his first big strategic play: Office for mobile

Microsoft is finally bringing its Office suite to Apple's App Store, with support for devices including the iPad and iPhone.

It's a same day launch, and you can already find the Excel, Word, and PowerPoint apps online.

The reveal from the tech giant's new CEO, Satya Nadella, is his first since he took the company's top job.

Nadella has been in the role for just 52 days, and speaking at Micrososft's press briefing said that he sees things with a "very fresh set of eyes, and a very fresh perspective."

He wants to see what Microsoft can do "to serve our customers better", and his topic for the presentation was the intersection between "cloud and mobile" and increasing productivity across a range of platforms.

Julia White, general manager of Microsoft Office, showed off a number of the mobile suite's features. It's designed to allow real time collaboration, syncing with Microsoft's OneDriver cloud system. The apps also support change tracking and markup.

The apps are priced on a "freemium" model – users won't have to pay a thing to read or present, but editing and sharing will require a subscription to Office 365 Personal.

Those subscriptions retail at $6.99 a month or $69.99 a year.

In order to manage employees, Microsoft have a custom company portal feature – the "identity management service" – allowing IT departments to limit various tasks depending on who's logging on.

As for Nadella's first outing since being selected as CEO – his presentation style was a bit limp. There were lots of mentions for IT professionals, including a repeated claim that "IT professionals can be heroes".

We're going to be seeing him a lot in the next few weeks. He's got three Microsoft keynotes on the horizon, and said that next week he'll be talking about "the great innovations in Windows… in the operating system and devices."