Microsoft Office Mobile, now in beta in iOS and Android versions, is a single app that combines the basic features of the existing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint mobile apps. It adds uniquely convenient file-management, document-creation, and PDF-management features that let you use the app for a dozen tasks that now require navigating between two or more third-party apps. Even in its beta version, Office Mobile is impressively powerful and intuitive, with occasional rough edges that should be smoothed down in the final version. It's a rare instance of an app that's been fully reimagined for the mobile era, and when it goes public—Microsoft isn't saying exactly when—you'll almost certainly want it as a supplement or replacement for the separate apps. Its conveniences are enough to make it tempting for anyone who now uses Apple's or Google's mobile productivity apps.
The beta version of Office Mobile is available now to anyone using Android; all you need to do is sign up for a Google Group for the beta and then click a download link. Instructions are on Microsoft's web site. If you use iOS, you'll have to wait for the release version unless you were one of the 10,000 people who signed up for the closed beta in November. I've been using the closed iOS beta version for a month, and I'm impressed with the way Microsoft packed so much into a compact, easy-to-navigate interface.
An Excellent Interface
That interface is one of the cleanest and most efficient I've seen in a full-featured Android app or iPhone app. The home screen displays your recently edited documents and notes. At the top is a folder icon that leads to files you can access from the app, along with a search icon. At the foot are three icons: one for home, a big plus sign for adding items, and an "Actions" button that I'll get to in a moment.
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The plus-sign icon brings up three more icons: one for creating a note; one labeled Lens, which lets you take a picture or scan a document or whiteboard using a different processing filter for each; and a third for creating a document. This third icon brings up a menu where you can create a Word document by scanning text or by opening a blank document. You can also create an Excel workbook from here by scanning a table or opening a blank workbook. Finally, it lets you create a blank PowerPoint presentation.
The Actions button leads to a menu that lets you transfer files from a computer to your phone, extract text or a table from an image, convert images or documents to PDF, or sign a PDF with your fingertip or a stored image of a signature.
Working With Documents
Office Mobile combines all these convenience features with reduced versions of the feature set from the separate Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps as found in the main Office software. The combined app doesn't let you use templates when you create documents, as you can in the separate apps, but the combined app is far more convenient for basic editing. For example, the separate app displays documents in their original fonts, probably at a size too small to read unless you adjust the display settings. The combined beta uses a large, legible standard font, on the assumption that you're using the app for basic editing, not formatting. I'm probably one of the last living human beings still using an iPhone SE—the one with the 4-inch screen—and Office Mobile is far easier than the separate apps for editing on my phone's minuscule screen.
Microsoft's existing separate Office apps for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint offer feature sets similar to Apple's mobile versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote and Google's mobile versions of Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Apple's and Google's apps offer some advanced features that Microsoft's separate apps and new beta version don't, and Microsoft offers features that the others don't. Even if you're already using Apple's or Google's apps for their advanced features, you may be tempted by the conveniences in Office Mobile, especially its file- and PDF-management features—which Google and Apple don't even try to match, and which aren't available in Microsoft's separate mobile apps. With Office Mobile, you can transfer files from your Windows or Mac computer to the Office Mobile app on your phone with a few simple steps. It's a matter of pairing your phone and computer and then dragging the file that you want to transfer into a browser window on your computer.
This feature actually takes less time to use than to describe. You start by tapping on Office's Actions button, then choose "Transfer Files." The app then tells you go to an easy-to-type web address on your computer and point your phone's camera at a QR code that appears in your computer's browser. As in other pairing routines, the phone and computer browser each display a numeric code, and if the codes match, you click "Pair" in the phone and browser, then drag files into the browser window (or select them from an Explorer or Finder window). In a few seconds, the files are transferred from your computer to a Microsoft service and from the service to your phone. You can send password-protected Office documents between your computer and phone using this system, but you may be reluctant to use it for super-sensitive data.
Of course, if you use Microsoft's OneDrive, you can transfer files by dragging a file on your computer to your OneDrive folder and then navigating in Office Mobile to the OneDrive folder on your phone, but Office Mobile's built-in file transfer lets you upload files from any computer, not only your own desktop or laptop. One predictable problem under iOS: Office Mobile can only access files that it uploads to your phone or that you've already placed on a OneDrive or SharePoint folder. It can't access files in your iCloud folder or you iPhone's Files folder. But the limitation is less understandably also presend in the Android beta. Bafflingly, the Office Beta, unlike the Word and other Office apps, can't access Google Drive, Dropbox, or other cloud-service drives. I hope this will change in the released version.
Working With PDFs
PDF management is equally smooth. If you choose "Sign PDF," you simply open a PDF file in the app and click on the place where you want your signature to begin. If you haven't already stored a signature for yourself, the app opens a screen where you can draw a signature with your fingertip and save it. This also appears in the PDF, where you can move or resize it easily.
Office Mobile's features that extract text from photos already on your phone or photos that you create from inside the app deliver mixed results. The most advanced separate text-extraction app I've found for my phone is Adobe Scan, which requires a free Adobe ID. Office Mobile produced impressive but mixed results when compared with Adobe Scan, but Microsoft's app let me perform all steps of scanning a page, extracting text to the phone's clipboard, and saving the image as a PDF, while Adobe sent me back and forth between Adobe Scan and Adobe Acrobat.
In many head-to-head comparisons, where Microsoft and Adobe both extracted text from a photo I had already taken of a paper document, Microsoft performed slightly better. In one instance, however, when scanning a page from a printed book by photographing it from my phone, Adobe produced perfect results and Microsoft produced word salad—but it's possible that slight differences in the way I was holding the phone when I took the photos of the book page may have affected this result, though I tried to use the same position for both.
Is Office Ready to Go Mobile?
Apple's mobile office apps offer special features that Microsoft doesn't try to equal, like an option that creates an overlay of "smart annotations" over your document, as if you were writing or drawing on a transparent overlay that you can remove when sending a document out into the world or to a corporate office. (Apple's Pages app also lets you save documents in Apple's iBook format, but I doubt many care about that.) Google Docs offers tight integration with the whole of the Google universe for storing and sharing files. What Microsoft's Office Mobile offers is a feature set that, in effect, thinks outside the suite and makes it easier than anything else to create or edit simple documents on the fly when on your phone. When Office Mobile eventually goes public, you owe it to yourself to give it a try.
In its beta form, Microsoft Office Mobile lacks some features of the current separate Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps. It does make mobile basic editing more convenient, however, and its file-transfer and PDF features are unique.
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