This morning, Microsoft rolled out updates to their Office suite of apps on Android. This includes Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint and Word. All of which got updates, albeit pretty small updates. These three apps are getting the Quick Access Commands in this update. What this does is when text is highlighted, it has “Smart Lookup” which will search the highlighted word or phrase. There are is also a select all, cut, copy, paste, and a few other paste options above.
Starting off with Excel, there’s not a lot of changes here. But you are now able to use the Excel app to open up .CSV files, which is a bit odd that it took this long to get this feature included, but it’s here finally. These files do open as “read-only” however. So you’ll be able to browse the files, but not do much in terms of editing them. You’ll need to save them as .XSLX to edit them. Quick Access commands came to Excel – as well as Word and PowerPoint in these updates. This new line takes the place of smart lookup and copy formatting.
With PowerPoint, there’s a few usability changes here. For starters, Superscript and subscript formatting is here. As well as getting the quick access commands feature that the other two apps. Not much of an update here for PowerPoint, but an update is still an update, so it’s nice to see it coming along.
Microsoft Word actually got the biggest update. Microsoft is giving users a better experience for inserting tables into documents in the app. The update makes inserting tables into the document much easier, and cells are a bit bigger, making it easier to use on a mobile smartphone. The other change here is the quick access commands that also appear in the other two apps.
All three of the Microsoft apps are available in the Google Play Store right now for your downloading pleasure. Remember that they are free, but to get the full experience, you will need to subscribe to Office 365. Which is unfortunate, but Microsoft does need to pay their employees.