Office 365 Released for Android and Why You Shouldn't Care

Today Office 365 was finally released for Android. Many hoped that this would bring greater productivity to Android and would offer greater functionality than the current third party options, but after I bit of time with it I have found the opposite.

As an internet marketer I try to stay on the leading edge of technology, so naturally I downloaded the app to try it out.

Subsciption Required

It’s listed as free although you must have an Office 365 subscription to use the app. I signed in with my Office 365 account and tried to open a .doc from a recent email. It wouldn’t work. Office 365 for Android does not support .doc files or .dot as it notified me. I found this to be completely ridiculous, as .doc files were the default file type for Microsoft Word up until Office 2007 and it’s still a widely used format.

I then downloaded the file on my computer and converted it to .docx hoping that would work. Luckily this was successful but if you were on the go and didn’t have access to a computer you’re a bit S.O.L.

Features

I spent the next little bit messing around with the features to which I found very little. I compiled a short list of these features.

• You can open .docx files. but not .doc files.

• You can change the text between green, yellow, red and black.

• You can highlight the text in green yellow or red.

• You can bold, italicize, underline and strike through.

• You can add/delete comments.

• You can search for words in the doc.

As far as I can tell that's the complete extent of the functionality. You can't bullet or utilize any sort of advance features.. It doesn’t appear that it even allows you to add pictures. It’s possible that this could be achieved with copy and paste, but given that it won't allow you to delete the picture used in the template doc I will have to assume that that is not an option either.

What Can I Do With It? 

With this in mind the only real use that I can find for this app or at least the word processing portion is to read and edit a pre-created doc. As a reader it is clean and functional and it allows you to comment and make minor changes, such as spelling or grammar but it's really no useful for creating a new document.

This is all based on my experience using the Office 365 app on my Samsung Galaxy S4 but unless they have major changes for tablets this is the best it's gonna get for now. I hope this helped you out. 

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