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7 things Microsoft didn't tell us about the new Office app


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7 things Microsoft didn't tell us about the new Office app

The new Office mobile app for iOS and Android is designed to help users complete 'microtasks' while on the go and combines Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Abstract binary data overlays an eye containing a reflection of the Microsoft logo.
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Microsoft last week launched Office, a new mobile app for iOS and Android that the company slid into an already packed lineup of individual apps.

 

Simply dubbed "Office," the new smartphone app — it runs on tablets, but Microsoft promised something skewed more towards them at a later date — steps back into time by combining multiple apps: Word, Excel and PowerPoint. (For those who rile at "OK, boomer," the concept smacks of early low-end suites, like AppleWorks or Microsoft Works.)

 

Yet Microsoft touted Office not as a return to Work-esque days but as how it sees a future of mobile productivity, with tiny tasks squeezed into any available free moment. If Microsoft's right, Office may be a harbinger of feasible work on a smartphone or even small tablet. Edit a complex Word document on such a device? No thanks. Pick at it here, add to it there? Maybe.

 

For all that Microsoft hinted at a revolution in the concept of mobile productivity, it gave a bare-bones walk-through of Office. It left a lot of details on the cutting room floor.

 

Here are some of the things Microsoft didn't tell us about Office or, if it did, under-hyped them. We've fixed that for them.

Remember the revenue-generating clause

Like virtually all free-for-the-downloading bits built by Microsoft, the new mobile Office app is licensed in a way that completing only personal tasks is legal.

"...you will not (and have no right to) ... use the software for commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating activities unless you have commercial use rights under a separate agreement," states the app's licensing terms.

 

In this case, "commercial rights" accrue from an Office 365 subscription assigned to the user by a user's employer. Consumer-grade subscriptions, including Office 365 Personal and Office 365 Home, don't provide such rights. Those that do: Office 365 Enterprise E3 and E5, as well as Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 (Office 365 is one component of the larger, more expensive Microsoft 365 bundle).

Microsoft says it saves space, but how much, really?

One of the ways that Microsoft has pitched the new three-in-one app is to claim it requires less storage space than the three individual apps it replaces.

 

"It requires far less phone storage than installing individual apps," the company asserted in a Feb. 19 post to a company blog.

 

Is that true? And if so, what is the difference?

 

On the iPad, the app weighs in at 352.8MB, while the three apps, Word (265.4MB), Excel (264.9MB) and PowerPoint (247.8), total 778.1MB. In other words, the new app occupies just 45.3% of the space needed by the three individual apps.

On the iPhone, the numbers are similar if not identical. The three-in-one app requires 361.9MB, compared to Word's 273.6MB, Excel's 273.2MB and PowerPoint's 257.4MB. The new app, then, needs only 45% of the space demanded by the three separate apps.

 

The new app needs less than half as much space as the individual apps combined. That's "far less" in our book.

Lens got rolled in

Microsoft's Office Lens — which snaps and straightens images of things like receipts and documents — has been available for iOS and Android since 2015, but it has always been a separate app.

 

Now it's also been embedded in the Office app, where it can be called on to "scan" paper freehand, then output the results in Word or Excel document formats, or as PDFs.

 

Note: Lens is still available as its own app, just as are Word and Excel and PowerPoint.

Individual apps aren't going away

The Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps on iOS and Android won't vanish, at least not immediately.

 

"We will continue to support and invest in the existing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint mobile apps," pledged Bill Doll, a senior product marketing manager, in a November post to a company blog. There was no promise by Doll that the support he spoke of would be permanent, however. Instead, he hinted at a Darwinian future for Office on mobile.

 

"We believe everyone should decide which experience works best for them on their phones," he added.

Office 365 subscription unlocks features

Only at the end of the Feb. 19 sales pitch did Microsoft make mention of Office 365 and its part in the new Office app. "An Office 365 or Microsoft 365 subscription will also unlock various premium features, consistent with those in the current Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps," Microsoft said.

 

A link in that sentence steers users here, where those "premium" features are listed for iOS and Android users with one of the qualifying subscriptions.

Microsoft account required for online storage

Although Microsoft said the Office app could be used without signing into any account, Microsoft's or otherwise, logging in is required to access OneDrive, Redmond's online storage service.

 

A Microsoft account, free for the taking, comes with 5GB of OneDrive storage space. More storage can be purchased separately.

 

Most users will have more OneDrive storage — at 1TB, much more — courtesy their Office 365 account (whether personal or provided by their employer). To access that, users will have to log into their Office 365 accounts.

 

A host of non-Microsoft storage services — ranging from Box and Dropbox to RushFiles and ShareFile — can also be tied to the Office app with the appropriate credentials.

Actions and microproductivity

Microsoft made a big deal about how the new app would allow users to conduct "microtasks" and be "microproductive."

 

"Microproductivity exemplifies meeting users where they're at: the modern world has increasingly fragmented work," wrote Jon Friedman, the head of Office design, in a lengthy post on Medium in December. "Instead of solely pushing people to focus more, however, we explored whether those fragmented slices of time could be more productive with 'microtasks.' A microtask is a bite-sized piece of a bigger task, like writing one paragraph instead of working on an entire Word document. Research showed microtasks increase feelings of productivity."

 

Those microtasks, Friedman asserted, average just 20 to 30 seconds, tiny slices of the four hours or so a day people spend on their phones. "What are the most valuable actions that someone can perform on their phone in less than 30 seconds?" he asked.

 

Some answers are in the new app's Actions screen, which — on the iPhone at any rate — listed a handful of tasks Microsoft believes best suited for the device. Among them: scanning text into documents, documents into PDFs and tables into spreadsheets, all on the back of the smartphone's camera.

 

 

Source: 7 things Microsoft didn't tell us about the new Office app (Computerworld - Gregg Keizer)

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