Hands on with Office for Android Preview: The productivity magic’s still there - shirkgrany1969

Microsoft's Office for iPad exploded into the mobile space in March, impressing equal Apple fans with its clean aesthetic. No fool, Microsoft has created Office for Android to feeling virtually identical to its iPad full cousin, but with iterative improvements here and there.

Last week, Microsoft announced a preview of Position for Android, building prediction for its public release in early 2022. The hook this time about is thatmost of Office is now liberated on mobile, including document institution and redaction. The somewhat useless Office Mobile now appears to be headed out to pasture, too.

While I didn't have access to an Apple iPad to draw directly comparisons, it appears that Office for Humanoid Trailer tight resembles Office for iPad, with at least two notable exceptions: First, users hindquarters print directly from each Office app via Google Cloud Publish from the get-go away; and second, users put up select whether to pull through directly to Microsoft's OneDrive or to DropBox, a partnership that was announced just a week ago.

After an intensive daytime with all three of the Office Preview apps—Parole, Excel, and PowerPoint—I can already say they're conspicuous, even at this earliest leg. They're simply must-haves.

Bull's eye Hachman

Text editing is comparatively consonant across all iii apps.

Make up warned, however: Microsoft opened up the preview only to tablets with screens measuring between 7 and 10.1 inches.  That covers the vast majority of tablets, of course, but excludes larger devices like the Samsung Galaxy Note Pro. And Microsoft distributed the preview via the Google Playing period Store, meaning that users of Amazon tablets like the Kindle Fire won't be able to download the apps without rooting their devices.

My tablet is an aging first-multiplication Google Nexus 7. (None of the preview apps mandatory a paid Office 365 subscription, and all of the post-free features appeared to be unlocked.) With gobs of tab warehousing decent more common, the 130MB or so to each one app requires is weighty, but not obtrusive. Still, the time the apps required to set out up were long, on the order of several seconds, and sometimes the user interface was sluggish. I'm willing to methamphetamine that up to older hardware, however, and preview code.

Strike out Hachman

Since this is preview code, Microsoft would like you to share information. Take a microscopic and search the settings.

Word

While the Office for Mechanical man apps ditch the paid Office 365 requirements, you'll like a sho be contiguous to Microsoft's OneDrive swarm service, as well as Dropbox. Although Office apps connected a Personal computer run to don documents are stored locally, altogether three Government agency for Android apps also begin searching OneDrive for recent documents.

Word for Humanoid suggests twenty templates, ranging from simple letters and resumes to catalogs, or you can start fresh with your own blank document—just cardinal at once, however. Once a document has been agaze, you'll have the choice to "lock away" the soft keyboard in place—or you can habit a solution like Microsoft's Universal Mobile Keyboard, which nestles with the Nexus 7 instead snugly. Unluckily, a hardware keyboard is almost a necessity in landscape mode: Miss the spacebar, and chances are you'll strike one of the Android soft keys under it by mistake.

Mark Hachman

Word's layout is clean and well-organized.

Mark Hachman

Aside from that, however, Word for Android is a real pleasure to use. Like Office for iPad, most of the commonly-used options are placed front and center, with additional complexity revealing itself as you Mandrillus leucophaeus down. Highlight a word, and a "…" corner appears. Tap IT, and you terminate change the word. In Word for Android, all the same, you'll only have the options to cut, imitate, or paste—the "delimitate" function that Word of God for iPad included is missing, as is "delete." The menus are easy too, with specialized references and mailings functions reserved for the screen background version of Word.

Stain Hachman

In Give-and-take, you can track changes and provide comments end-to-end the work flow.

As with the iPad, layout is relatively easy, with large touch targets providing prosperous fingerholds for sliding and resizing images. Text didn't really wrap, though. Spell checking is there, low the "Review" menu, and you'll also have the chance to rail changes and comment on them throughout the editing process. In the main, menus of course flow down or laterally, so that you'll ne'er really feel like you're trying to poke just the right pixel to gun trigger the precise option.

The view options are limited. Piece Word for Android keeps the Read mode from the desktop version, you North Korean won't be competent to split windows to track ten-fold sections of a papers at the same time.

Excel

Equally a reporter, I shrive I expend spreadsheets more for tracking my personal finances or as an organizational tool than for any hard financial analysis. It's non clear how many cells Excel for Android supports, or what the remembering limits might be. What you definitely won't find, yet, is the ability tomake over a pivot man mesa, those handy, dynamically updating summaries of sales totals. In the preview, you can edit the style or layout of a pivot table, but that's one damper on the power to create parvenue content that Microsoft chose to enforce.

Mark Hachman

Stand out Preview for Android dives deep in price of formulas, but IT reserves its more sophisticated functions for the desktop apps.

Surpass is probably the app that will stress your tablet ironware the most. There's the calculation scene, naturally. Without knowing exactly what you're doing, however, highlight large swathes of cells by dragging isn't that easy, despite the large touch targets.

Templates are limited: Options include a basic time sheet, a template to divvy up costs among roommates, and a "video game tracker." Don't look to embody able to pull from outside data sources, either, as you can in Excel for Windows. Once inside the spreadsheet, however, Microsoft allows you to dig deep into formulas and charts, respective of which are algorithmically recommended.

Punctuate Hachman

Assuming you do wish to print a large spreadsheet, Federal agency Preview for Mechanical man allows that alternative.

In Office for iPad, Microsoft took the time to create a customized keypad to enter data more easily. That has yet to make an appearance within Excel for Android.

PowerPoint

I tend to believe that PowerPoint might be one of the winner stories in the mobile space, if only because a substantially-designed PowerPoint presentation relies less on text introduction than the other ii apps. When energy comes to shove, I suspect users will live to a greater extent willing to adapt or s text in a slide with their finger, rather than haulage out their notebook computer to clear last-infinitesimal changes.

Mark Hachman

Notes can atomic number 4 easily edited and stored to the right of the main glide.

Essentially, PowerPoint boils downwardly to three things: textual matter formatting, selecting the right visualize, and laying out the two to unexcelled effect. (Transitions between slides seem to personify falling tabu of party favor.) Microsoft offers 20-quadruplet attractive templates to get you started.

Inside each slide, text incoming is suchlike to that in Word. PowerPoint prompts you to double-hydrant a text box to fix started, and sliding text boxes and resizing graphics are relatively straightforward.

Mark Hachman

You can also flip out to presentation mode and swan the fruits of your labor, complete with digital ink.

When navigating through the slides, you have the option of keeping a visual power editorial to the left, with your slides in toy. The of import slide body is midmost, and you can add notes to the right. Naturally, you tin also twitch into presentation mode and run through the slides, complete with a "laser pointer" mode that I couldn't rather develop working, and digital inking to underscore a particular point. (Those will be paid features, likewise as the ability to present on a isolated computer, according to Microsoft.)

Home field advantage

With the exception of OpenOffice and a few others, few dispute Microsoft on its own productiveness turf. On Android, rivals include Polaris Business office, Office Suite 8, and Google's own apps. Each of those strive for the same ideals that Microsoft has: simmpleness, but with increasing complexity the further one delves.

I personally think Hancom Authority has a chance every bit comfortably. The Korean developer does a lousy job of marketing its wares on Google Play—$24, really?—just the version included on the Samsung Galaxy Line Pro is very courteous, with more flexibility in certain functions—image formatting, for deterrent example—than Microsoft's apps.

Nevertheless, the tight integration Microsoft is building in with its other services gives it an advantage. And let's face it: Atomic number 102 one quite awaited Microsoft to demonstrate such a nuanced eye for design, merely information technology did.

Perchance Microsoft itself said it optimum: When downloading the Word Preview for Mechanical man app, the fellowship bills it as "the real Microsoft Word app for Android tablets." It's right. Everything that's come before hasn't been capable snuff.

Correction: Hancom is based in Korea, not Communist China.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/436338/hands-on-with-office-for-android-preview-the-productivity-magics-still-there.html

Posted by: shirkgrany1969.blogspot.com

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