Gadgetory

hello again ladies and gentlemen I'm Joe handy the Android authority app guide Microsoft Office is now free to use for everyone on Android which means it's about time we took a closer look at it ok so there's very little about Microsoft Office that you don't already know you know what Microsoft Word spreadsheet and PowerPoint are and how they work so thankfully this part of the review won't take very long as you can imagine the mobile version of Office contains these three things and you can use them to create and edit documents presentations and spreadsheets when creating and editing you have the basic tools like editing and control you also have some basic formatting features should you need them it's not nearly as powerful as the desktop applications are the office 365 Web Apps that's really a shame and we hope they increase functionality eventually but aside from some tweaks here and there it's going to be difficult to prepare full featured documents of presentations on the mobile version it's a fairly simple application and that's about all it does in terms of pure functionality however there is more going on under the hood using Microsoft Office requires a Microsoft account once you have that you'll automatically get some storage for Microsoft's onedrive service which you may know by its prior name which is SkyDrive currently you get 7 gigabytes for free and there's a promotion for now that gives you an extra 3 gigabytes of storage if you download the onedrive app and use it to upload your photos from your Android device so you can get a possible 10 gigabytes for free now that matters because everything you do in Microsoft Office is saved and drawn from your onedrive account much like how every document you create in Google Drive is also stored in Google Drive there is very little difference between the two fundamentally and for that Microsoft does deserve a little bit of praise in terms of design office actually looks pretty good moving around the application is so simple that no one should be getting lost it uses some of the Android design guidelines such as swipeable tabs and using the logo at the top to go back to previous pages inside the files it's easy to navigate around your documents it automatically saves every single file to onedrive so you can't really go surfing around your device storage so don't plan on being able to do that the interface is overall very simplistic and the controls in the apps are pretty simplistic too really nothing is difficult at all that doesn't mean it isn't tedious because it definitely is tedious in order to get the full experience you'll have to download the onedrive application as well that's really the only good way to navigate your onedrive account when you open documents in onedrive it'll automatically opening Microsoft Office but the office application itself doesn't surf onedrive accounts very well and we thought that was kind of a poor design choice okay so here's what we liked about Microsoft Office Microsoft is finally giving it the old college try their first attempt at an office app was not the most popular option and it didn't work all that well now that it's free and it's been overhauled and integrated with onedrive it is much better than it used to be one of the biggest complaints about non microsoft office apps is how it wrecks the formatting of Microsoft Office documents with this application that should no longer be a problem you are forced to use onedrive for storage for this application and that kind of sucks but they do give you seven gigabytes for free so it's not all that bad you can also get three more gigabytes for a limited time by downloading the onedrive app and giving it permission to upload your camera roll so you start with about 10 gigabytes and even though Google Drive gives you more at least Microsoft doesn't leave you in the dirt in terms of cloud storage full integration with onedrive means that if you download the onedrive app on your PC and have an internet connection you have full control over the documents on both platforms without any difficulty office on mobile can open any document in onedrive as can the PC office app as can the office 365 web app multi-platform integration is never bad ever lastly the design isn't terrible Microsoft has developed some questionable mobile apps for Android in the past and this does not fall into that category it doesn't follow all of the Android design suggestions but it does follow a few of them and the app design positively reflects that and here's what we didn't like so much we would have liked to have seen more formatting tools you can do the basic stuff like bold underline italics color and size but things like adding images advanced formatting and others aren't present and that's disappointing integration with onedrive is fantastic and I really like it but knowing when to use which app for which purposes is a little hard to get used to like if you need to open a document you'll find it easier in the onedrive application rather than the office app and that's a little bit disorienting also your only storage option is onedrive although you can download files from onedrive to your local storage if you have to despite the good design the controls are a little bit tedious when you open a document you have to click the pencil icon in the top in order to edit it that extra step kind of screws with the brain because you're kind of used to just being able to open an application and go that along with the way the app lets you see formatting options can be tedious and even a little bit frustrating to get used to here's the bottom line with Microsoft Office Mobile it's a lot better than I was expecting it to be given prior experiences with Microsoft applications there really wasn't that expectation that this would be directly comparable to the best Android has to offer as it turns out it is directly comparable and Microsoft has a pretty good app here that said you won't be concocting epic documents with this application you can edit them and create some basic stuff but the hard work will still have to be done with either the web application or the desktop application in any case if you're an office user or a onedrive user and you have Android I highly recommend you check this app out once again I'm Joe mini the Android authority app guy don't forget to subscribe to our youtube channel and if you want to follow Android authority myself for the rest of the video team you can find our social media links in the video description below if you're hanging out for a minute we have a couple of awesome Android authority videos for you to watch right over there including my review of blank bubble and seven more awesome office applications for Android finally don't forget to check out the written companion in the video description because that's where you're going to find the download link as always thank you for watching and have a wonderful day