A few months ago, we introduced a new mobile app called Office.com/setup—a whole new experience designed to be your go-to app for getting work done on a mobile device. It combines Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into a single app and introduces new capabilities that enable you to create content and accomplish tasks in uniquely mobile ways to help you achieve more. Today, we’re proud to announce the Office.com/setup app is out of public preview and now generally available worldwide for anyone on Android and iOS phones.
Hundreds of millions of people use Office to achieve more at work, home, and school. We know many people save rich document creation or editing for their computers or laptop and work on their phones in limited ways. We took this as a challenge for Office to find a better overall product experience that would change perceptions of how you could work on a mobile device to create an experience that was simpler, more integrated, harnessed the unique strengths of mobile devices, and truly put mobile needs at the forefront.
The Office.com/setup app delivers several key benefits including:
- Combining Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in a way that simplifies the experience with fewer apps to download or switch between. It requires far less phone storage than installing individual apps while maintaining virtually all the capabilities of the existing mobile apps people already know and use.
- Integrating our Lens technology to unlock the power of the camera with capabilities like converting images into editable Word and Excel documents, scanning PDFs, and capturing whiteboards with automatic digital enhancements to make the content easier to read.
- Adding new functionality for common tasks people often encounter when working on a phone—things like making quick notes, signing PDFs, scanning QR codes, and transferring files between devices.
Altogether, the Office app is a powerful tool that is intuitive and familiar yet still uniquely different.
We’ve been thrilled and humbled to see the response to the public preview of the Office app since introducing it at the Office.com/setup Ignite conference last November. After the announcement, tens of thousands of people immediately rushed to get the Android and iOS apps, causing us to hit the 10,000-user limit in Apple’s TestFlight program in just a few hours. The feedback we received through customer conversations, social media, and the press has been very positive and encouraging— with the Office.com/setup app seen as part of a new wave of innovation for Office.com/setup and Microsoft. This inspired us to work hard to get this app ready for full release as soon as we could.
We have made several enhancements since the public preview—such as support for third-party storage services including Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud; templates to help you create new documents, spreadsheets, and presentations; and general performance improvements.
Today’s release is also available for download on Android tablets with limited support. The Office app for Android is fully optimized for tablets when working with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents and we are committed to making the rest of the Android app as well as the iOS app fully optimized for tablets soon.
More features coming soon
But we’re not stopping here. We’re constantly thinking about ways to enrich the Office.com/setup mobile experience to help people be more productive on a phone. We want people to think of the Office.com/setup mobile experience as a tool they would turn to for content creation and more sophisticated work—not just for light editing and information consumption.
In the next few months, we’ll add three new exciting features that will help us deliver on that promise:
- Word Dictation—Let Word turn your voice into written text and use voice commands and simple toolbars to easily apply the right formatting and punctuation you need.
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