Within 24 hours of being available in the App Store, Microsoft Office for iPad already skyrocketed to the top of the charts. It’s free, so that is one thing going for it. We also cannot deny that Microsoft Office does have some advantages over Apple’s own productivity suite.

Today, though, Microsoft has earned even more bragging rights over the success of Microsoft Office for iPad. There is no denying it – with more than 12 million downloads from the App Store, who can raise any questions about the popularity of the app/s?

In a tweet early this morning, Microsoft showed just how proud it is about the download figures; and who wouldn’t? That’s a number you can’t ignore.

Not all details have been divulged, though, as it may be easy to forget that a user needs to have an Office 365 subscription in order to take full advantage of Microsoft Office for iPad. (Source) That will cost you $99.99 per year, with the option of auto-renewing monthly or annually. In fact, our initial report mentioned that it will be free to create and edit documents – so we were wrong!

But, do you really need an Office 265 subscription to use Microsoft Office for iPad, which is free?

It depends on what you need. If you only need to view or read and present documents/presentations using the iPad, then you’re good to go without having to pay a hundred bucks. However, if you absolutely must be able to create documents and edit them on the tablet, then you’ll just have to shell out that money – or just go for Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.

Awesome as that 12 million figure may be, I don’t think I am going to be part of that statistic any time soon. How about you?