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.
As is often the case when Microsoft updates the Office apps, there are some new features that are specific to certain apps. In this update, Excel has gained the ability to open files that contain ActiveX
New Features in Microsoft Office
controls. This, up to now, required the desktop or web version of Excel to do. For Word, moving tables that are embedded within your document has become much easier. Now you can simply drag the table into place in the document instead of having to do a cut & paste of it, a much more touch friendly way of handling them.
The updates to Excel, PowerPoint and Word are all rolling out to the Play Store now and if you have the apps installed, you should see an OTA update over the course of the next day or two.
