How to Print from Office for iPad

 
The new Microsoft Office apps for iPad are surprisingly nice and full-featured, but there’s one very major feature they’re missing: the ability to print. It’s easy to print from your iPad if you have an AirPrint-equipped Wifi printer, which includes most mid-priced printers sold in the past few years. Most productivity apps like the iWork suite include printing—but in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for iPad, there’s no print button to be found. That’s a problem, especially for Word, if you’re using Office for iPad for real work and don’t have another Mac or PC to print from. 

And yet, it’s not a problem at all—it’ll just take a couple extra steps. Here’s how you can print from any of the Office for iPad apps today, and as a bonus, how to export your Office documents in PDF format from your iPad or Office.com. 

Just make your documents in Office on your iPad as normal, and save them to OneDrive. That’s the default place to save documents in the Office apps on iPad, and it’ll let you open them in the Office.com web apps. That’s important, because it has printing and a hidden PDF export tool, where the iPad apps don’t offer either for now.

Once you’re done, open Safari on your iPad, go to Office.com, select the app you were just editing the document in on your iPad, then choose the Recent documents on OneDrive button and select your file from the list (it should be the document on the top). Now, just tap the Print button in the top ribbon of the document preview view. Alternately, if you open the document for editing in the Office web app, tap the File tab in the ribbon, then select the Print tab and click the Print button. Either which of those will open a small popover that’ll let you know it’s getting your document ready to print, and then will say Click here to view the PDF of your document. 

Click that link, and then you’ve got two options. If you wanted to print the PDF, just tap the share button in the top of Safari, select Print, and follow the directions to print as normal. Your document should look the exact same as it did in Word thanks to the fact that PDFs preserve all of your formatting and look the same everywhere. Then, if you actually wanted a PDF of your document in the first place, you can save it to your iPad or share it directly in any of your apps, just like you would with any other PDF. 

I’d assume Microsoft will add printing support to the Office for iPad apps soon, but for now, that should be enough for you to get your documents printed from your iPad without needing a Mac or PC. And that’s pretty nice. 

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Just getting started with Office for iPad? Don't forget to check out my guide to getting started with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for iPad on Tuts+.

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