The devices, expected to be mostly tablets and to begin to ship in late October, will include a preview version of Office Home & Student 2013 RT, which will be replaced via download with a full-featured version via Windows Update download once the version for the user's language becomes available.

Office Home & Student 2013 RT will only run in Windows RT machines and will not be sold as a stand-alone product, Microsoft on Thursday in a blog post in which it detailed the particulars of this Office version.

The Office version for Windows RT will include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, and has been designed to provide what Microsoft calls "a complete Office experience" while also being optimized for tablet touchscreens and low battery consumption.

This version of the productivity suite was built from the same code base as the versions of Office for computers running x86 and x64 chips from Intel and AMD. Office for Windows RT includes "the vast majority" of the features available in Office Home & Student 2013 for PCs, according to Microsoft.

It offers a "full Office feature-set and fidelity and service parity," including the ability to save files to the SkyDrive online storage service and synchronizing application settings via the cloud among different devices.