Microsoft Office
Office goes all–in–one on iPhone.
Microsoft Office has been available on iOS for several years as individual apps, but the new Microsoft Office app is an all-in- one that combines Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Office Lens in a single app. Although it’s listed as iPad compatible, it’s very much an iPhone app and doesn’t take advantage of your iPad’s bigger screen.
The core app is free and enables you to subscribe to Office 365 in Personal or Family versions for $6.99 or $9.99 per month respectively. That upgrade doesn’t affect what the Office app can do, but it boosts OneDrive storage to 1TB and unlocks power features in the main Office apps for your Mac or PC.
The app opens with a list of your available Office documents. As you would expect, Microsoft would prefer you to use its OneDrive storage, but you can also pull from your device, from the Files app, from SharePoint, or from a range of cloud services including
Dropbox, Box and various business-focused services.
Clean interface
The interface has been stripped back considerably for iPhone, so for example in a Word document there’s a single formatting strip above the on-screen keyboard and just a handful of icons in the top-right corner, including the share icon, which you can use to invite others to collaborate or simply to send a copy of the document via iOS’s share sheet. The interface has clearly been designed with one-handed use in portrait mode in mind: the Excel icon strip looks particularly empty in landscape.
Fast-work features
This Office has been specifically designed for mobile working, and it includes some clever touches. Office Lens integration means you can take a photo of a document and instantly convert it to an editable Word document or Excel spreadsheet; PowerPoint can help you build a presentation
“The core app is free and enables you to subscribe to Office 365 in Personal or Family versions for $6.99 or $9.99 per month respectively. That upgrade doesn’t affect what the Office app can do, but it boosts OneDrive storage to 1TB.”
based on the photos you select from your Camera Roll; and you can snap and enhance whiteboards during meetings or lectures. The app can open links from QR codes, create PDFs from photos or Office documents, and enables you to sign PDFs with your finger. The app also handily integrates Microsoft’s Sticky Notes for written or handwritten notes and scribbles.
The all-in- one Microsoft Office is not designed to replace the existing apps for iPadOS: it hasn’t been optimised for iPad and says so when you first run it, recommending the individual apps instead. It’s not much fun on iPad as it’s too small at normal size and too bulky if you scale it up, and we’d much rather use the full-fat versions for document, spreadsheet, and presentation work. But for accessing and quickly dealing with Office documents on the move, capturing bits of useful information and enabling you to quickly work on ideas, Office does a good job. It also does it with a much smaller footprint than the existing apps: Office is 377MB compared to 880MB for the individual apps combined.
Good for capturing ideas and dealing with things on iPhone, but not great on iPad.
“Office Lens integration means you can take a photo of a document and instantly convert it to an editable Word document or Excel spreadsheet; PowerPoint can help you build a presentation based on the photos you select from your Camera Roll.”