Get Office apps for Mac Start quickly with the most recent versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote and OneDrive —combining the familiarity of Office and the unique Mac features you love. Set up individual Office apps for your iOS device. Version 3 unifies the app across the iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch, with the iOS version in particular getting a pretty extensive new look, with support for a dark mode as well as a new full.

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Microsoft today launched Office for Android and iOS in general availability. The unified app means you no longer need to download, install, and switch between the individual Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps. The company today also announced new features coming to the app this spring: Word Dictation, Excel Cards View, and Outline to PowerPoint. You can download the app now for Android phones and tablets (limited support) from Google Play and for iOS from Apple’s App Store (iPhone-only, iPad support is coming later). You can use Office for free, and if you sign in with a Microsoft Account or connect a third-party storage service you can access and store documents in the cloud.

Microsoft has over 200 million monthly active Office 365 business users and over 37 million Office 365 consumer subscribers. When the company launched the new Office mobile app as a public preview in November, “tens of thousands of people” rushed to try it. Microsoft has found that most users and businesses want to use the Office app as a hub or starting point for all their document work. “The idea behind the Office app is to give our users a single place from which they can access all their relevant content,” Office product manager Nithya Sampathkumar told VentureBeat. But that’s not the only reason to adopt it — Microsoft’s push to roll out nifty AI features in Office is especially noticeable in this launch.

Between public preview and general availability, the Office app has gained several enhancements. On both Android and iOS, Office now includes templates to help you create new documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, as well as support for third-party cloud storage services Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud. On iOS, you can now create a Presentation from images and use Dark Mode. On Android, Office gained a bunch of tablet optimizations.

Additive features

The only functionality that the standalone Word, Excel, and PowerPoint mobile apps have that Office doesn’t yet have is optimized tablet support on Android and iOS. Other than that, all the functionality of the existing mobile apps is there. You can thus uninstall the other three apps if you’d like. After all, the Office app does take up less space than the three apps. Additionally, businesses now only need to deploy and update one app. We asked Microsoft 365 general manager Rob Howard if the three will be killed off, and he said no.

“There’s definitely no disruption we want to cause,” Howard said. “There are hundreds of millions of downloads of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as individual apps on Android and iOS. We’re not getting rid of those, killing those, or telling people they need to change their workflow. If people are happy with those and excited about them, we absolutely want them to continue using them.”

We asked Microsoft for a full list of features in the Office app that aren’t available in the individual Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps. If you do choose to install Office, here’s what you can expect.

Home

First, there’s the Home screen, which has the following features:

• Recommended documents
• Files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF), media, and notes all in one place
• Search for files across your organization, cloud storage, and device

The AI-based recommended documents section is pretty powerful because it leverages the Microsoft Graph to serve up relevant suggestions. It takes into consideration which documents you’ve created that others have read or edited, which documents you have read and edited, how long you spent in a document, recency, frequency, sharing, and so on. “It’s taking all of that signal about all the different ways you collaborate and then building recommendations on what’s the content that I’m most likely to be interested in, and then looking at the activity of those documents and prioritizing them using machine learning,” Howard explained.

Best of all, the Office app tries to precache documents so you can open them quickly (or even offline).

New button and Actions

Next, there’s the New button, which includes:

• Sticky notes
• Lens (for digitally enhanced whiteboards, documents, and photos)
• Scan text — Take a picture of a document and turn it into an editable Word document
• Scan table — Take a picture of a table and turn it into an editable Excel spreadsheet
• Choose pictures — Get a jumpstart on a new presentation simply by choosing pictures from your device

Lens is worth calling out because it uses AI to convert images taken with your device’s camera into editable Word and Excel documents. Lens can also scan PDFs, capture whiteboards, and even automatically digitally enhance what was captured. The next three options also leverage AI to help make content creation in Office much more productive on mobile. “Lens is all about connecting the physical world and pulling into the digital word,” Howard said.

Finally, there are Actions, which represent common tasks people encounter on the go:

• Transfer files — Quickly share files between your phone and computer using a QR code
• Share nearby (Android only) — Share files to other nearby Android phones with the Office app
• Sign a PDF
• Scan to PDF
• Pictures to PDF
• Document to PDF
• Scan QR Code
• Image to Text
• Image to Table

Interestingly, almost all of these are mobile-only experiences. Again, Microsoft isn’t just porting over desktop features here.

Word Dictation, Excel Cards, and Outline to PowerPoint

Microsoft also shared what’s next for the Office app. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint help you view documents and maybe even do a little light editing. Office is meant to be for “more sophisticated work.”

“The big focus for us with Office on mobile is to help people not just consume content but also create content,” said Howard. “To help them really be productive on the phone.”

Microsoft plans to ship the next three features this spring.

Word Dictation will do exactly what you’d expect — it will use AI to turn your voice into written text. But that’s not all — you will be able to use voice commands (such as “numbered list” or “new line”) while still having access to toolbars and formatting options as you dictate.

Excel Cards View converts table rows to a more digestible card format so you do not have swipe back and forth across columns on your screen. It’s essentially an easier way to view and edit the data in an Excel row on mobile.

Assimilate scratch for mac. Outline to PowerPoint lets you write your presentation content as a simple outline. PowerPoint Designer, the AI-powered service that offers presentation suggestions, will then turn it into slides using styling, formatting, and iconography.

Beyond Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

These features will be coming to the new Office app first and will show up in the individual Word, Excel, and PowerPoint soon after. Howard explained that while the codebase is the same for all these apps, the testing they go through is different, resulting in a lag between the same feature landing in different apps.

Microsoft is also exploring whether to build more apps into the Office app, such as OneNote. “We are looking at ‘How do we add more capabilities?'” Sampathkumar said. “Users do tell us, ‘We see this as a content hub. We want to see OneNote here.’ We are looking at how we can add it while still keeping the size small. We don’t want the size of the app to bloat up. Because for users who do not use OneNote, they don’t want a bloated app.”

Best Free Office Apps

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Microsoft recently updated their Microsoft Office apps for iOS making it possible to now use iCloud Drive to sync Office files from a Mac or PC to an iPad or iPhone. We’ll show users how to take advantage of the new feature so they can work on their Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint files on a Mac or Windows PC, and then open them on an iPad or iPhone.

This guide assumes the user owns Microsoft Office 2013 or Office 365 for Windows or Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac. It should work with older versions of Office for Windows, too. The user must use the latest versions of the iOS apps.

Get Microsoft Office for iPad or iPhone using the links below to the App Store:

We assume the user will start by creating the document on their computer. It’s possible to create a file on an iOS device and then open it on a computer, but the user will need to save it to OneDrive or Dropbox and open the file from OneDrive or Dropbox on their computer. The iOS apps don’t let users save to iCloud on their iPad or iPhone yet.

To save files in OneDrive or Dropbox, create a document, spreadsheet or presentation and then tap the back arrow on the top left of the Word, Excel or PowerPoint app. This opens the screen where users can save their files. Choose OneDrive or Dropbox to save the file. Open the file on the Mac or PC from the OneDrive or Dropbox folder.

Install the appropriate software by downloading it from Dropbox or OneDrive.

Saving Files to iCloud on Windows

The user must first set up iCloud on their Windows machine. Use the steps Apple provides to download the Windows software that adds iCloud to Windows. Install the software and sign into an Apple iCloud account.

The iCloud settings app will create a link to iCloud Drive inside the Windows User folder. It also sets up syncing of Photos, Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Tasks and Bookmarks for their default browser.

Users who think they’ll store a lot of files in iCloud Drive should consider upgrading. Click the Storage link in the dialog box shown above to upgrade. The service comes with 5GB free. Upgrade for a monthly charge.

Buy 20GB for $.99/month, 200GB for $3.99/month, 500GB for $9.99/month or 1TB for 19.99/month.

Now that we’ve got iCloud set up on the Windows PC, go ahead and open one of the Microsoft Office programs and either open a file that you want to use on an iPad or iPhone or create a new document. Then save that file in the iCloud Drive folder on the PC created by the iCloud Drive installer. Find it in the Windows Users folder. For example, the installer put mine in C:UsersKeviniCloudDrive.

I put a shortcut to iCloud Drive in my Quick Access section in Explorer by opening Explorer and dragging the folder to the Quick Access section on the left side of the Explorer window.

Open the C:UsersYour User Name folder and drag the iCloud Drive folder to the Quick Access section on the left side of the Explorer window.

I’m doing this on Windows 10 Technical Preview, but Windows 8 and Windows 7 should look a lot like this screen shot above.

Now, from a Microsoft Office application, click on File and Save As and Browse. This opens the a dialog box used to save the file. Use the Quick Access shortcut to easily find the iCloud Drive folder or find it inside the User’s folder. Hit Save and it will save the file and then upload it to iCloud Drive.

If you want a local copy and an iCloud copy of the file, then save it in your default documents folder too.

Saving Files to iCloud on Mac

Saving files on a Mac works like Windows, except OS X Yosemite users don’t need to install any software. This doesn’t work on OS X versions older than Yosemite.

To save a file from a Microsoft app, first create the file or open one from the computer. When finished editing the file, click on the File menu and then choose Save As.

Find iCloud Drive from the left hand column and choose Save.

These steps will save the file to the iCloud Drive and makes it available to the Microsoft Office apps on an iPad or iPhone. It will also make it available to any other computer with iCloud Drive.

To save a local copy and an iCloud copy, make sure to save it to the default documents folder as well as iCloud Drive.

Saving Files to iCloud via Web Browser

Some people may want to upload files to their iCloud Drive from a computer that doesn’t have iCloud Drive. Maybe the person is using a friend’s computer or a public computer.

Open a web browser and go to iCloud.com. Sign in and click on iCloud Drive from the grid of icons.

The screen shows the folders of all the iCloud Drive enabled apps installed on your iOS devices. Users can also create their own folders.

Apple Tv Office Apps

To upload a file to sync with other computers or an iOS device, click on the upload button at the top of the screen.

The upload button looks like an arrow pointing up at a cloud. It’s just above and to the left of the word iCloud Drive in the image above at the top. Clicking the button opens a dialog box. Find the file and then click on Open and the site will upload the file. It’s now available on the iPad or iPhone apps and on any computer with iCloud Drive or via any browser.

Accessing Files on iPad or iPhone

Open a Microsoft Office app, like Word. Tap on Open (on the left in the iPad version and at the bottom in the iPhone version) and then tap on More.

The Open button shows up on the left on the iPad app as seen above or on the bottom of the screen on iPhone.

Tapping on More opens the iCloud dialog box (see the iPad version below). Find the file and tap it to open it.

Apple App Store Microsoft Office

After opening the file, edit it and then tap on the back arrow in Word, Excel or PowerPoint and the app will automatically update the file in iCloud. The Mac or PC will then update the copy stored on the computer from the cloud, keeping it up to date.