Finally, Microsoft’s classic Office applications have made it to the iPhone. The app’s got a rather long unnatural name called ‘Office Mobile for Office 365 subscribers’ and is available for download in Apple’s iOS App Store.
For the time being, it’s only available for iPhone and there’s still no word on an Android version or iPad compatibility. The app is compatible with iPhone 4, 4S, and 5, iPod Touch 5th Generation and requires iOS 6.1 or later. Although the app is free, but an Office 365 subscription is required for use. Don’t worry, Microsoft offers a free one-month trial of Office 365.
Apart from creating, viewing and editing your Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, the key features of the app are:
- Cloud support – One can access Office documents that are stored on SkyDrive, SkyDrive Pro, or SharePoint.
- Recent Documents – The documents you’ve recently viewed on your computer are readily available on your phone in the recent documents panel.
- Email Attachments – You can view and edit Office documents attached to email messages.
- Support for charts, animations, SmartArt Graphics, and shapes.
- Resume Reading – When opening a Word document from SkyDrive or SkyDrive Pro on your phone, it automatically resumes at the place where you left off reading, even if you last viewed the document on your PC or tablet.
- Presentation Views – The Slide Navigator view in PowerPoint lets you browse slides faster, while speaker notes help you practice your presentation.
- Edit While Offline – You can view and edit recently used documents even while you’re offline. Your changes will be saved online when your device reconnects to the network or to Wi-Fi.
- Share – Send the document in email or save it to SkyDrive or SharePoint.
Sadly, the app currently works only for users based in the United States. Microsoft confirmed to BGR that the app will begin rolling out in other countries and it will be available across 136 markets in 29 different languages.
