Microsoft is announcing a major step forward for Office on phones. The company is finally combining the three core Office apps into a single app, meaning you can now get Word, PowerPoint, and Excel — all in a single, unified experience.
Microsoft says the company started building the new Office app by combining the standalone Word, PowerPoint, and Excel apps and then added a number of new features that significantly improve the experience.
The new app, which is available both on Android and iOS as a preview, includes a home screen where users can find all their documents. You can also see your recent media or your notes from Sticky Notes on the app. And then there’s a new Actions section where Microsoft has introduced a lot of smart new features — you can create PDFs by simply scanning a whiteboard, for example, or sign PDFs right from the app, or easily transfer files between your phone and computer or other nearby phones.
It also puts things you are likely to need pretty often on the page — like the ability to turn an image of a table into an actual table, for example. The new app is definitely a really nice addition to the Office family, and it will be interesting to see if Microsoft will eventually phase out the standalone Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps in the future. For now, you can sign-up for the public preview on Android here, and for iOS users, the public preview is already full because of the limit Apple puts on TestFlight programs.
