Category: Microsoft Word

The latest update to Microsoft Word for Android is rolling out in the Play Store, bringing support for PDF file viewing within the productivity app.  Now if you have a PDF file stored on your OneDrive or Google Drive account (or locally on your phone or tablet), you can have that file opened in Word instead of another app.  For readers who are heavily into the Microsoft app ecosystem, this will be welcome news as they won’t have to switch between different apps to view the file.

It should be noted that PDF support in Word is read only.  You cannot edit them and would need another app to do that for you.

Microsoft has pushed an update out to the Android version of Excel, Word and PowerPoint to the Play Store.  The updated Office 365 apps brings new features to each app that continue the company’s drive to have feature parity between the desktop and the mobile screen.  For Excel, the big new feature is the ability to open a file that contains form controls.  Form controls, as the name suggests, are when you have a form embedded into a spreadsheet.  This previously could only be opened on the desktop.

For PowerPoint, a likely more useful addition than the form controls in Excel for most of us.  Now in PowerPoint on Android you can send a single slide to someone.  Previously you had to send the entire presentation and couldn’t send an individual slide.  Again, this is something you could do on the desktop and online version of PowerPoint but now can do it on your phone or tablet.

The Microsoft Office suite of apps for Android – Excel, PowerPoint and Word – have all been updated today with several new features and improvements.  Perhaps the biggest new feature across all three apps is the ability to store your files on an SD card on your device.  To this point you could only save your files in your device’s main storage.  That can be problematic for those who do a lot of file editing on their devices, especially those with low storage devices.  This new feature, which is across all three apps, should help solve that problem.  There is nothing special you as a user have to do other than tell the apps to store on your SD card.  Your device, however, must be running Android Lollipop or later to take advantage of this feature. All three apps now also give you the ability to annotate files.  You can use a stylus or your finger to write, draw or highlight.  These new tools found in the Draw tab, a new tab in each app.