Microsoft’s new Office app arrives on iOS and Android with mobile-friendly features

[Karlston]

Microsoft’s new Office app arrives on iOS and Android with mobile-friendly features

Even more mobile features are on the way soon

 

Microsoft is releasing its new unified Office app for iOS and Android today, which combines Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into a single application. The software maker first started beta-testing this new Office app as a hub for all things Office mobile back in November, and now, anyone can download and install it. Microsoft has focused on surfacing some of the more mobile-friendly parts of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into quick actions that let you get stuff done on the go.

 

All of the main apps are combined, meaning you can switch between documents quickly, scan PDFs, and even capture whiteboards, text, and tables into digital versions. Microsoft is also adding support for third-party cloud storage like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud. Today’s release will also be available on Android tablets with “limited support,” and a fully optimized tablet experience will be available on both iPadOS and Android soon.

 

While the initial feature set will be useful for quickly creating templates, scanning tables, and just using Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files on the go, Microsoft has more mobile-focused features planned. Word dictation looks set to be one of the most interesting. You’ll be able to use Word within this Office app to dictate your voice into text. There’s even a voice command bar for adding punctuation like commas, question marks, and exclamation marks.

 

 

Elsewhere, Microsoft is planning to make Excel easier to use on mobile with a new cards view. You’ll be able to view and edit data from Excel rows in a card view that makes it a lot easier to see on a vertical phone screen. Excel was designed with columns and wider screens in mind, and often, you’ll scroll across a dataset and forget which line you were looking at. This new card view helps improve that for people who want to edit and view Excel sheets on the go.

 

The final new feature that Microsoft is planning for the future converts a simple outline into a PowerPoint presentation. “Often there’s just a bunch of bullet points or a bunch of ideas we start with,” explains Office app product manager Nithya Sampathkumar in an interview with The Verge. “So we said, ‘how do we make sure that work can get started on mobile?’ That’s the basis for create outline.” The new feature lets you write a presentation in bullet points or a brief outline, and PowerPoint’s Designer feature will transform it into presentation slides complete with a style and formatting.

 

New Excel card view.

 

New PowerPoint outline feature.

These three new features won’t be available today, but Microsoft is planning to introduce them in the coming months. For now, you can download the new unified Office app for iOS and Android. Microsoft is still planning to keep the individual Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps available for people who only use the standalone versions, but this combined app is clearly where most of the new mobile-focused features will appear in the future.

 

 

Source: Microsoft’s new Office app arrives on iOS and Android with mobile-friendly features (The Verge)

[techno]

Been using this daily. Really love it.

[Karlston]

Microsoft releases new all-in-one Office app for iOS and Android

The key feature is an Actions menu for quick access to common mobile tasks.

First image of article image gallery. Please visit the source link to see all 9+ images.

 

Today, Microsoft launched the Microsoft Office app for iOS and Android. It combines PowerPoint, Word, and Excel into one application, and it adds a number of mobile-oriented features.

 

“This app maintains all the functionality of the existing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint mobile apps but requires far less phone storage than using three separate apps,” Microsoft’s description in the iOS App Store says. The app is free to download and use, but many “premium features” are locked behind an Office 365 subscription.

 

After a few privacy notifications and the like, the app launches to a homescreen that lists all your recent cloud documents, with a bottom navigation panel. That panel can take you to other places. The first is the add menu, where you can create a document or note either from scratch, from a template, or from something captured by your device’s camera. Documents you create can be stored in iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, or Dropbox.

 

In addition to Word, PowerPoint, or Excel documents, you can add simple notes, but for some reason, these are not part of Microsoft’s existing OneNote service. “Lens” is another option besides creating a document the old-fashioned way; this camera-based document generator is the same as we’ve seen in Microsoft’s standalone app by the same name.

 

The second is the Actions panel, which is a vertically scrollable list of quick actions common on mobile devices. It includes:

• Transfer files
• Image to text
• Image to table
• Sign a PDF
• Scan a PDF
• Pictures to PDF
• Document to PDF
• Scan QR code

 

Full editors for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents are built-in to the app, and Microsoft has aimed to keep the available features and options the same between the stand-alone apps and this all-in-one app, even if there may be some layout differences. Unfortunately, there’s no iPad version at this time, so iPad users may wish to continue using the standalone apps on that platform.

 

The new Office app is available for both Android and iOS today, though it might take a little while to show up in app store search results. Microsoft intends to continue supporting and adding new features to its standalone apps for the foreseeable future.

Listing image by Samuel Axon

 

 

Source: Microsoft releases new all-in-one Office app for iOS and Android (Ars Technica)  

 

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