Microsoft has made a move many were waiting for, freeing Office from the Windows environment and making it available on iPads.

The Office suite is one of the few areas where Microsoft still holds almost unchallenged dominance, and it had been under immense pressure to make the products available outside of Windows.

With the rise of tablets mostly passing Microsoft by, users have been waiting for the tech giant to bring their favourites Word, Excel and Powerpoint outside of the home ground.

Now, Microsoft's new chief executive Satya Nadella has revealed a reasonably featured, though trimmed down, version of the software.

Office for iPad is comprised of three separate applications - Word, Excel and PowerPoint - and is available for free, though some options are locked.

Useful features such as document editing require an Office 365 Home Premium, Small Business or Enterprise account.

The programs became available over the weekend, and will only run on iPads with iOS 7.0 or later.

Microsoft has retained a lot of the visual and technical approach of traditional Windows desktop applications for the outside-Windows release.

Office for iPad has a top ribbon for commands and menus, but also sports some distinct iOS optimisations such as a custom on-screen keyboard for Excel.

Some of Excel’s more recent features like pivot tables are not available on iPad, but over 400 formulae have been included.

Word for iPad now has voice-to-text dictation and AirPlay, which streams presentations to a TV via WiFi.

Powerpoint presentations can use any one of 50 favourite transitions, and features an on-screen laser pointer.

The software suite is integrated with Microsoft's cloud storage OneDrive, or Sharepoint for collaboration and sharing.

Office Mobile has been launched too, which includes viewing and editing capabilities for documents on Android and Apple mobiles. It is available in Apple's App Store and Google's Play store.