Friday, November 7, 2014

Microsoft Office, Now Free on Mobile

Everyone can now get Microsoft Office free on their iPhones, iPads and (soon) Android tablets.
Full-featured Word, Excel and PowerPoint finally on the devices we spend more and more time using—and free? If it was 2011, that would be incredible news.
But at the end of 2014, trying out these new apps on a phone and tablet just underscores how out of sync the king of productivity software has become with the way we use the Internet. Now that we can edit files across several devices, it exacerbates long-standing weaknesses in Office’s online capabilities to keep track of our work and collaborate with others. Microsoft Office isn’t moving as fast as competitors like Google Docs into a world where we expect to start writing a file on a PC, pick it up via phone while on the train, then finish it at home with a tablet.
What Microsoft gets right in the new Office apps is a no-compromises approach to viewing and manipulating files. Like with Word, Excel and PowerPoint for the iPad that came out earlier this year, Office for iPhone and Android tablets keeps the fidelity of documents and spreadsheets made elsewhere. To make letter-sized Word documents legible on small screen, the app has a button at the top that re-flows their contents at reader-friendly font size, without altering the document itself.
Across all the apps, finger-friendly buttons and menus control most of the functions you really need: formatting, word counting and more. The new Android app—which isn’t yet available for phones and remains a limited, non-collaborative “preview” on tablets through early 2015—is similar to the iPad with a few menus and buttons relocated. On the iPhone, Office’s famous (or infamous) horizontal “ribbon” of editing options has moved to the bottom of the screen. It feels like an in-app keyboard replacement that gives you powerful controls for inserting pictures, formatting or reviewing your document. Still missing, however, is a thesaurus.
Microsoft's Office apps have touch-friendly buttons on both iOS and Android.ENLARGE
Microsoft's Office apps have touch-friendly buttons on both iOS and Android. MICROSOFT
While generally intuitive, these Office apps still have a few bugs. For instance, my apps listed two copies of every file I saved to Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud service, an issue the company says it is aware of and hopes to fix on a future release.
All the apps themselves are free, but for many people this isn’t actually going to be a good way to get Office free. You still need to pay to use it on a PC, or else you’re stuck with the free Web-based Office Online service. Not only is the Web version very watered-down, it couldn’t handle a graphics-rich Word document I made with a Microsoft template.
And the free apps reserve certain capabilities for paying customers, but the list is curious: Free users can make Word documents in portrait, but they can’t switch to landscape. Free users can’t track changes. And, in a move to protect the more lucrative enterprise side of Office, free users can’t open and save documents shared from someone using OneDrive for Business.
Being kept from those premiums is an acceptable trade-off for a mostly usable free Office suite. But the frustration I faced trying to edit Office files across multiple devices and with multiple people isn’t forgivable.
The current champion of real-time collaboration is the free Google productivity suite, including Docs, Sheets and Slides. Mind you, these apps aren’t as pretty or as capable as Office, but they do one thing extremely well: Every device and every person with a document open sees the latest version at all times, so long as they’re connected to the Internet. Working together in real time is a breeze.

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