Andrew Heinzman
It’s time to empty out the “Microsoft Office” folder on your phone. The new unified Office app, which combines Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Sticky Notes into a neat little package, is now available for all Android phones.
This new Office app, which was first unveiled as a public beta in November of last year, is reminiscent of the old Google Drive app. It brings all of your documents together in one place, and provides a convenient launching point for Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, without the need for separate apps. It automatically syncs with your Microsoft account (it even syncs Sticky Notes), and it provides some handy mobile features, like PDF scanning, PDF signing, and local file transfers.
And like Google Drive, the new Office app makes it easy to switch between Microsoft accounts on the fly. It sports a super clean design, and it can connect to a handful of cloud storage services, including Dropbox and SharePoint.
Still, we’re not entirely sure what Microsoft plans to do with the new Office app. Will it slowly replace the independent Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps, or is it meant to work as a quick hub for editing documents, transferring files, and scanning PDFs?
Microsoft also hasn’t released a tablet-specific UI for the new Office app, and it’s still locked into Apple’s TestFlight program on iOS. It seems that the company is focused on providing a suite of apps for its upcoming Android flagship, the Surface Duo—though it will come out of beta on iOS eventually.
You can download the new Office app through the Google Play Store.
