Organize files in Office for iOS
How to manage, share, and collaborate in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
REQUIRES
Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint
you will learn
How to use file storage options in Microsoft’s iOS Office apps
IT WILL TAKE
15 minutes
One of the key requirements of an office package is that it’s flexible with document organization. Apple’s iWork iOS apps technically allow you to edit and move documents between cloud storage providers, but it’s not that flexible. If you want easy access to documents, you’re driven towards storing them all in iCloud Drive. In contrast, Microsoft’s Office apps – Word, Excel, and PowerPoint – are far more forgiving. All three apps enable you to link into a wide range of cloud-based solutions, putting you in charge when it comes to choosing where to store documents. You can also easily choose to store documents offline on your iPad.
There’s direct support for seven different cloud providers at present – these make it easy to save changed documents back to their original location (manage these services by tapping your account picture and choosing Edit). But even if your chosen service isn’t directly supported, Office is flexible enough to indirectly support it – install its associated app and it should appear as an option in the iOS Share menu when you tap More. It’s not quite as friendly this way (you can’t save automatically back to the original folder), but the step-by-step guide reveals how to work around this.
The Microsoft apps also offer ways of both sharing documents and collaborating on documents shared by others. The second half of the guide shows you how to share and collaborate – if your contacts have multiple email addresses, use the one associated with their Microsoft Account so they can edit the doc in Word.
Tap Share > Shared With to review who has what access – tap their name to change privileges, or to stop sharing the document. The web link option makes it easier to share more widely (but beware, anyone with access to the link can then view or edit the document), while Send a Copy allows you to share a separate copy of the file by another medium, typically email.