Office Word/PowerPoint: forward delete button hardware keyboard does not work as expected

Question

My favorite hardware keyboard for my iPad is the Logitech K380 (http://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/multi-device-keyboard-k380), which has separate backspace key (delete character to left of cursor) and forward delete key (delete character to right of cursor). 

In the Word document editor, the forward delete key does not behave as expected though, and instead it does the same thing as the backspace key. This is unfortunate, because text editing is much easier if you have both forms of delete. Similarly, in a text box in PowerPoint or Excel the forward delete key does not behave as expected. 

However, in the text search field of Word, the formula editor field of Excel and the document search fields of all three apps the forward delete key behaves as expected. In other Apple and third-party apps the forward delete key works as expected. 

My hunch is that the Microsoft's own text input implementation of Word, Excel and PowerPoint does not recognize that the input from the backspace and forward delete key of the K380 keyboard are different. However, whenever Word, Excel and PowerPoint used an iOS API to create a simple one-line text field, the delete key is recognized correctly. 

On the other hand, I also have the Logitech Keys to Go keyboard (http://support.logitech.com/en\_us/product/keys-to-go-ipad). While it does not have a separate forward delete button, pressing the function key ("Fn") and the backspace key ("Delete") combination invokes the forward delete. This forward delete function works as expected everywhere including in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and all across iOS apps. 

So the problem seems to be that the document editor of Word and text field editors of Excel and PowerPoint does not recognize forward delete instructions coming from external keyboards with dedicated forward delete buttons. 

Microsoft: please fix.

Answer 1

Hi,

I would like to know if there was any updates installed.

Let us try to uninstall thee Office apps and reinstall it and check.

Hope this information helps you. Please let us know if you need additional information.

Thank you.

Answer 2

Dear Harsha,

Thank you very much for your reply. I deleted and reinstalled all 3 Office apps (all version 1.24). The problem is still there is all three apps. 

I am hoping to hear new suggestions from you.

Answer 3

Dear all,

I am still waiting for advice that goes beyond deleting and reinstalling apps. This is not Windows.