This is the second in a series of blogs, where we’ll bring you up to speed on many of the new developments Microsoft has got planned for 2020 – including announcements from the Ignite conference in Florida, which Total attended.

In this blog, let’s look at Microsoft’s announcement that it will be releasing a new Office app for iOS and Android. This is similar to the Office app which is available on Windows 10 and provides a central portal to access your office applications and documents.

Mobile Office
Mobile devices are becoming more and more capable, and for many people are starting to replace their laptops, at least part of the time. For business users, one of the ‘must haves’ is a way to create and edit Microsoft Office documents on their tablet or smartphone.

Up until now, Microsoft has provided separate apps for iOS and Android users: Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and so on. Now, the new Office app will actually replace Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Office Lens (a handy image capture app that turns your smartphone into an easy-to-use scanner) on mobile devices. It’s worth mentioning that the new app is smaller than the existing versions, saving valuable space on your device.

The Office app in use
Total was lucky enough to get on to the iOS ‘test flight’ for the app, which means we got a sneak preview of what’s coming up.

When you first launch the app, the Home screen shows you the most recent documents which you have been working on, across OneDrive and SharePoint Online. Along the top, it shows you activity on recent documents that you have access to and opened.

What we really like is the integration with Windows Sticky Notes, so if you have the Sticky Notes app on your desktop and you’re signed into Office 365, this will keep your notes in sync and show them on this app.

Also, when selecting the ‘+’ button you have the option to create a new Note (in Sticky Notes), use the Office Lens functionality to take a picture or create an Office document. Then, the Actions screen provides you some very useful features such as Scan to Text and converting an Image to a table in Excel. All of this is integrated well, and works smoothly.

Overall, this looks to be a great new app from Microsoft, which will make it so much easier to work across any device, with useful new functionality.

Missed part 1 of the blog series? I looked at the productivity benefits coming to Microsoft 365 and you can read it here.