Office for iOS picks up support for iCloud Drive, all other cloud services

When the new Office for iOS apps launched, the only way to sync files across multiple devices was to store them in Microsoft's own OneDrive service. In November, Microsoft and Dropbox partnered up, giving the third-party service most of the same features as OneDrive (absent real-time collaborative editing).

Today, a new update for the iOS apps added support for iCloud Drive, the cloud storage platform Apple introduced last fall alongside OS X Yosemite. If you're signed into iCloud on your iPad or iPhone, you'll automatically be able to view, search, open, and edit your documents through iOS' native iCloud Drive file picker.

If you prefer to use other cloud storage platforms, this new update also adds support for the Document Provider extensions Apple introduced in iOS 8. If you're a cloud storage provider and you add one of these extensions to your app, other compatible apps will be able to open files from and save files to your service without requiring any extra work. The result isn't as seamless as the Dropbox integration that Microsoft has baked into the apps themselves, but it's a possible solution for people who want to use the Office apps but don't want to use OneDrive or Dropbox.

While the Office apps will work on any device running iOS 7.1 or newer, the Document Provider extensions are only available to devices running iOS 8 or newer.

The Microsoft Office apps for iPhone and iPad are all available from the App Store. The download and most editing features are free with a Microsoft account, and a handful of "premium" editing features are locked away behind an Office365 paywall.

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