Category: Microsoft

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.

Microsoft has once again updated their Android launcher app, Arrow Launcher, with some nice improvements.  The update, version 1.4 for those keeping score at home, brings several improvements in user controls.  For example, you can now hide page headers, a feature that many users of the launcher had requested.  Users can also hid SMS preview on the People and Recent page.  This change is done in the Settings of the launcher.  Both of these changes represent the fact that Microsoft is indeed listening to users of their apps as both were heavily requested changes.

Microsoft has officially – and finally – released an official Xbox app for Android.  The new app, which is more-or-less a replacement for the current Smartglass app (which you can still use), brings you an all new Home experience with an activity feed, see trending content, find friends and other Xbox centric activities all from your phone or tablet.  For those of us who have the console, this new app is very much a welcome addition and shows, again, Microsoft’s commitment to their “mobile first” strategy by offering apps on both Android and iOS in addition to their own beleaguered Windows Phone platform.  Up until this point, you could only get the app for Windows Phone.

The Microsoft Android team has been busy.  Earlier this morning I told you about a major update to the Next Lock Screen app for Android.  Now the Office team has rolled out an update to the Android versions of Excel, PowerPoint and Word.  All three of the updates are now in the Google Play Store and you should be seeing them hit your devices at any point.  The big news in these updates is the addition of the Tell Me feature in the apps.  If you aren’t familiar with Tell Me, you probably have it and don’t know it.  If you run Office 2016 on your PC or Mac, at the top of any of the apps there is a search box titled “Tell me what you want to do”.  Type in what you are wanting to do in any of the apps and it will give you instructions on how to do it.  It is far faster than trying to dumpster dive into the menus of the apps.  That same feature is now available in the Android versions of the apps so you can quickly figure out how to do something without having to search around.

Microsoft’s latest improvement to their launcher app for Android, Arrow Launcher, brings more improvements and functionality to the app.  For those who have tried it,  Arrow Launcher gives a mult-page look to your phone that brings things like contacts, widgets, most used apps and reminders within easy reach and is designed for Android phones.  The latest update, version 1.3.0.22862 for those keeping score at home, brings a handful of new features to the app.  The biggest of those new features is integration with Wunderlist.  With this update, all of your lists are displayed and you can set reminders for the app within Arrow as well.

Over at Amazon, you can pick up a great deal on Office 365 Home Edition from Microsoft.  Right now if you order the card version (meaning they ship you a card with your access codes), you can get it for just $76.09.  That’s a savings of $24 over the regular $99 price tag.  Keep in mind too that this is the Home edition so you can install Office on up to 5 PCs or Macs (or any combination) with this one purchase.  The license gives you access to download both the offline versions (the Office apps you are familiar with like Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, Excel & Access) as well as the online versions of these apps plus a few more, like Sway, online.  Across 5 PCs or Macs, this breaks down to just $15 a year for each computer to have Office.  Yep, it’s a pretty good deal.  From an Android perspective, if you have Office 365, you get access to all of the mobile versions of Microsoft’s apps for free too.  These will be completely unlocked when you sign in with your Office 365 account.