Earlier in the week, I was discussing a great feature of the Microsoft Office Excel Android phone app. I realized it had been several years since I’d talked about the free Microsoft Office apps available for download for your Android phone and tablet and your iPhone and iPad.
Touch-friendly versions of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint are available for download from both the Google Play Store and the Apple App store.
These apps will open and edit documents created in the desktop version of Office and also allow you to create documents that will work in any version of Office.
To download the apps, head to the Google Play or Apple App Store. You’ll find Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, as well as a OneDrive and Outlook app. I will caution you that Outlook mobile is quite a bit different than Outlook for a desktop, though I find the other apps to be very similar to their desktop counterparts.
Click Install to download to your device.
When you open, you can sign into your Microsoft account. This will give you access to your free OneDrive storage, which is especially important on devices like tablets with smaller hard drives. OneDrive also allows you to access documents easily between your PC, phone and tablet.
Here’s a look at Word in action.
You can open and edit any document created in the desktop version of Office. Any file created or saved here will be compatible with Office on any other PC, Mac, tablet, or phone. Pretty neat, huh?
You can attach your tablet to a keyboard to type or just tap the screen to use the onscreen keyboard. You can also print from these apps.
The layout for Exel will look familiar as well.
.Alas, they are not available for the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, though there are other office suites out there that work with it.
The free apps aren’t quite as full-featured as the paid apps available through Office 365 subscriptions. But if you’re already paying for Office 365 subscriptions, you’ll have access to additional features through your subscription.