HOW TO Use Microsoft Office for iOS
1 Open it up
The new Office app for iPhone puts everything in one place – documents, spreadsheets, presentations and notes. You access everything through 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 at the foot of 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’re going to 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 appears when 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 opportunity to crop it, share it or redo it. It’ll then create a new document and show the scan underneath it so you can look for any mistakes.
6 Explore the interface
Word on the desktop is quite a busy thing, but it’s much simpler on iPhone. Tools stay out of the way until you need them. Here we’re at the top of our document so we get top-level options such as 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 the bit that says Home, you can change the toolbar to bring up different tools: layout tools, reviewing tools, drawing tools and so on. The name of the toolbar sits at its very left-hand side, just 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 actually need it. Here we’ve selected a cell, and as you can see the context-sensitive toolbar pops up with relevant options.