HOW TO Use Microsoft Office for iOS

1 OPEN IT UP The new Office app for iPhone puts everything in one place – notes, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. You access them via the home screen, which shows your most recently used documents in date order.

2 START IT UP To create a new Office document of any kind, tap the big “+” button on the home screen. This gives you three options: Notes, for jotting stuff down; Lens, which you can use to photograph whiteboards; and Documents.

3 CHOOSE YOUR TOOL If you click on Documents, you’ll see this screen, which gives you three options for each of the key Office tools: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. We’ll use one of the cleverest Office features here by choosing Word > Scan Text.

4 SCAN SOME WORDS Word’s document scanner either works brilliantly or terribly. If you want the former, you’ll get best results with good contrast large print or by getting close with the camera. A red box indicates Word is happy to scan.

5 WORK WITH YOUR TEXT After a short processing delay, Word will show you the photo and give you the option to crop it, share it, or redo it. It then creates a new document and shows the scan underneath it so you can look for any mistakes.

6 EXPLORE THE INTERFACE Word on the desktop is quite busy, but it’s simpler on iPhone. Tools stay out of the way until needed. Here we’re at the top of a document so we get top-level options like view, search, and share.

7 GET MORE TOOLS The toolbar above the keyboard provides quick access to key tasks such as formatting. If you tap on the three horizontal dots at its right–hand side, a bigger menu pops up with more detailed options. Tap the arrow to minimise it.

8 CHANGE THE TOOLBAR If you tap on Home, you can change the toolbar to bring up different tools such as layout tools, reviewing tools, drawing tools, etc. The name of the toolbar sits at its very left–hand side – tap it to bring the menu back.

9 EXPLORE EXCEL Excel’s interface works in the same way as Word – most of what it can do is kept off-screen until you need it. Here we’ve selected a cell, and as you can see the context-sensitive toolbar pops up with relevant options.