Microsoft has quietly rolled out updates to the Office suite apps Excel, PowerPoint and Word for Android today, bringing a few product enhancements and tweaks to each app. For those of you who use and have the apps on your phone or tablet, the OTA updates are in the Google Play Store now and should be hitting your devices over the course of the next few days. With these update, each app has gotten a bit of attention when it comes to new features or improvements to existing features.
For Excel, the main update is a pretty basic new feature but one that many users will applaud. You can now open Comma Separated Values (CSV) text files within the app. CSV files are very
Microsoft Word For Android
common, particularly when sharing across platforms but to this point you could only open them on your desktop. Now you can on your tablet or phone to speed up your productivity and not having to change platforms to open them.
For PowerPoint, There are three main new features. First, you can now format text in superscript or subscript. Second, you can create columns of text. You can split a block of text into easier to read columns. Finally, you now have quick access to commands that are context sensitive. Depending on what you are editing will give you different commands within the app.
Lastly, for Word, you have two new features. Microsoft has added touch controls for working with tables in the document app. Now you can insert and resize both rows and columns while within your document on your device. Second, much like the quick access commands in PowerPoint, you have the same concept in Word. Depending on what you are doing will give you quick access to different commands.
All three apps are free on devices 10.1″ or smaller and to fully unlock all of the functionality, you will need an Office 365 subscription.
