Microsoft Office to Be Offered for Free on Windows RT Tablets

The Redmond-based software giant announced on Thursday that all Windows RT tablets would be shipped with a free copy of Microsoft Office.

What's more, the company revealed in a blog post that this particular Office version would be called Home & Student 2013 RT, but the software won't be available on the first shipped tablets.

Basically, Microsoft will launch the RT tablets on October 26 and, instead of the full version of the so-called Home & Student 2013 RT, these devices will feature a preview of the app. Why exactly?

It seems that the new Office suite won't be ready at the time of the RT debut, so the first buyers of the tablet will receive the software between November and January via Windows Update.

So, the good news is that Home & Student 2013 RT will be offered for free, but there's also a bad part: it will lack some features available in the full-featured Office, such as Flash support, but Microsoft assures us that it will come with all the tools we need the most.

“Our highest priority was making sure that customers can successfully do the things that are most important to them when using Office on these Windows RT devices. You may also notice some of the enhancements we made to optimize Office for the Windows RT environment - like automatically enabling touch mode (but if you don’t notice and find that everything just works as you’d expect, that’s okay too),” Microsoft said in the blog post.

Microsoft will launch the ARM-based tablets, briefly known as Windows RT, in October, while another version of the tablet will follow soon. While Windows RT is mostly aimed at home users, the second Intel processor-based tablets will target businesses and will be called “Windows 8 devices.”