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Microsoft's Nadella may reveal Office on iPad on March 27

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella may take the wraps off the long-rumored Office for iPad suite at a Microsoft press event focused on cloud and mobile on March 27.

Mary Jo Foley
Mary Jo Foley has covered the tech industry for 30 years for a variety of publications, including ZDNet, eWeek and Baseline. She is the author of Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft plans to stay relevant in the post-Gates era (John Wiley & Sons, 2008). She also is the cohost of the "Windows Weekly" podcast on the TWiT network.
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Mary Jo Foley
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Microsoft

It looks like Microsoft's new CEO himself may be taking the wraps off Microsoft's Office for iPad.

Microsoft has scheduled a March 27 press briefing in San Francisco with news "focused on the intersection of cloud and mobile computing." Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will be providing the opening remarks.

According to several sources of mine, Microsoft's latest timetable calls for the company to finally introduce the long-rumored Microsoft Office for iPad suite of applications before the end of March 2014. This March 27 event sounds like it might be the time and place.

The suite for the iPad is rumored to include only Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, and possibly no other Office client apps. It is expected to be downloaded from the Apple Store but most likely to require a Microsoft Office 365 subscription, similar to the way Office Mobile for iPhone works.

The recently announced Microsoft Office 365 Personal subscription -- which allows users to install Office on one PC or Mac, plus one tablet -- is expected to add iPads as one of the supported tablet types. (Right now, "one tablet" means "one Windows tablet," only.)

Office for iPad, code-named Miramar, is looking increasingly likely to make it to market ahead of Microsoft's touch-first version of Office (code-named Gemini), as I've blogged previously.

Microsoft executives have acknowledged, in a somewhat roundabout way, that Office for iPad exists and is coming. Last we heard, it sounded from ex-CEO Steve Ballmer that it was going to arrive sometime after Microsoft's own touch-first, Gemini implementation of Office. Gemini is Microsoft's Metro-Style/Windows Store versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

But Ballmer and the senior leaders of the company may have had a change of heart toward the end of last year. According to one of my contacts, Ballmer OK'd the suggestion by the Office team that they'd bring Office for iPad to market as soon as it was ready, even though that would likely mean before the Windows 8.1 version. I'm hearing that new date for Office for iPad is sometime in the first half of calendar 2014. (My sources last summer were hearing Office for iPad wouldn't debut until fall 2014.)

Microsoft is planning to Webcast the March 27 event, which will kick off at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET.

It'll be interesting to see what, if anything, Microsoft says about the coming Gemini suite of touch-first apps for Windows 8.1 at the upcoming event.

This story originally appeared as "Microsoft CEO Nadella may unveil Office on iPad on March 27" on ZDNet.