Microsoft on Monday announced their new Office mobile app for iOS and Android devices. The new app unifies the functionality of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into a single app.
Microsoft says the new app, which is currently available as a preview, simplifies working with Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations while also introducing some new features designed to enhance productivity.
Camera integration allows users to quickly convert photos of documents and table into Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. PowerPoint presentations can quickly import photos from a device’s camera roll. A new Actions pane allows users to quickly accomplish common tasks, such as creating PDFs from documents or photos, scanning QR codes, signing PDFs with a finger, and much more.
The Office app provides a simple, integrated experience that puts the tools you need for working on a mobile device at the forefront of the experience. We started by combining the existing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint mobile apps into a single app. Doing so brings all of your Office documents together in one place, reduces the need to switch between multiple apps, and significantly reduces the amount of space used on your phone compared to multiple installed apps. We then added new capabilities that harness the strengths of mobile devices, such as the camera, to enable you to create content in uniquely mobile ways. Finally, we added a new Actions Pane that helps you accomplish many of the common mobile tasks you need to do all from one place.
Office for mobile isn’t ready for a wide release to the public, so Microsoft is making it available as a public preview. That means it’s available only through Apple’s TestFlight program, and will be available to the first 10,000 users. The new app is currently available only for phones, but the app will be expanded to tablets in the future.
The new app doesn’t mean an end to the standalone Office apps, as Microsoft says it will continue to support and develop new features for those apps.