Microsoft brings ‘Office’ app to Android, iOS users: Here’s what it does

Microsoft has millions of users working on its 'Office' applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint. However, for both Android and iOS smartphone users, it can be a task to access documents across different services as it requires them to download separate apps for all of them. To solve this, Microsoft launched its 'Office' app for testing back in November last year. The app is supposed to be a one-stop destination for users who want to create and share Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps. Now, this app is available to all the users around the globe. It can be downloaded from the App Store or Google Play Store.

As explained by the Redmond-based tech firm, the Office app brings three key benefits among others:

-It combines the 'goodness' of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in a single app so creating new documents and watching all of them at a single place is less time consuming. This also means less consumption of phone's storage.

-The Office app by Microsoft also brings the company's 'Lens' technology for converting images to editable Word and Excel documents, scanning PDFs and other content so it is easier to read.

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-Adding features for common tasks that people face when working on a phone. This includes functionalities like making quick notes, signing PDFs, scanning QR codes, and transferring files between devices.

Besides the basic 'Office' app features you also get support for third-party storage services including Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and iCloud.

Microsoft adds that there are more features coming to the platform in future and even mentioned some of them. First will be Word Dictation that will let you simply type a text with voice narrations. Excel Cards View is another feature that will be coming soon. With this, users can view and edit data in an Excel table row in a card format for easy viewing. The third feature is Outline to PowerPoint that lets you type slideshow content as an Outline, which converts to presentable slides with styling and formatting by the PowerPoint Designer.

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Although the app is free to download and use, if someone logs-in, connects to a cloud storage service or has a Microsoft 365 subscription, the app will unlock some more features that are not available for others.