Microsoft releases Office Mobile for Android phones (tablets need not apply)

Microsoft Wednesday added Android to the list of mobile operating systems now supported by Office Mobile. But Office Mobile for Android only covers phones, not tablets, limiting its utility.

The Android version, Office Mobile for Android, is also arguably the weakest of the bunch, in terms of compatibility with Microsoft Office. Microsoft is still tacitly encouraging users to buy Windows Phones, which come preloaded and activated with Windows Mobile and don’t require an Office 365 subscription to use. The problem is, within the Android world, there are a number of other office solutions that provide very good direct competition to Microsoft’s offering.

MicrosoftHolding your phone vertically allows you to edit your PowerPoint slides.

Nevertheless, Office Mobile for Android is free and downloadable from the Google Play Store. The only requirement is that your phone must contain Android 4.0 or higher, and you must already have purchased Office 365.

In a break with Office Mobile for iPhone, Microsoft doesn’t even offer the option to purchase Office 365 from within the app; instead, users must sign up outside the application itself. And without Office 365, Office Mobile for Android is virtually useless.

“The release of this app shows that we’re committed to keep providing additional value for Office 365 subscribers,” said Guy Gilbert, a senior product manager of the Office apps for Microsoft, in a blog post.

Qualifying Office 365 plans include Office 365 Home Premium, Office 365 Small Business Premium, Office 365 Midsize Business, Office 365 Enterprise E3 and E4, Office 365 Education A3 and A4, Office 365 ProPlus, and Office 365 University.

There are also Office 365 government plans that include Office Mobile. Users can also visit Office.com and sign up for a free 30-day trial, Microsoft said.

While Microsoft eventually intends to make Office Mobile for Android available across 33 languages and in 117 markets, it’s only currently available for the United States. That will change over the next few weeks, Microsoft said.

Like Office Mobile for iPhone, the Android version comes with mobile versions of Excel, PowerPoint, and Word; Office Mobile for Windows Phone adds OneNote as well. So far, Android users don’t have access to the Outlook Web App app that Microsoft recently released for the iPhone, either.

MicrosoftOffice for Android users can create documents in Word or Excel.

Users can create new documents, edit those that they’ve already created, and save, load, or edit files saved to Microsoft’s SkyDrive or SkyDrive Pro—which on Tuesday received a few upgrades, as well.

But the ability to create files only applies to Word and Excel; for now, you can review your PowerPoint slides and edit them, but not create a presentation from scratch.

Users can also open a document via email. Office Mobile includes a couple of handy features designed for the phone;

The software knows what documents you’ve recently accessed on your PC, and those are the first options presented when you choose to open a saved file.

A feature that Microsoft calls Rapid Resume also works like Amazon’s Kindle, ‘fast-forwarding” you to the portion of the document last viewed on your PC.

An “outline view” in Excel and Word allow you to quickly navigate through the document, and both apps allow annotations as well.

Within the three supported apps, Microsoft has made efforts to make editing a snap; in Word (shown at top of story), for example, tapping the pencil brings up the most common editing functions. Excel allows you to filter and sort data and create charts, using the local processor to calculate data.

Within PowerPoint, users can review slides and edit speaker notes, move and hide slides, and make text edits directly from the phone. Holding the phone in a portrait orientation allows edits to be made and includes a quick navigation bar; a landscape orientation serves as presentation mode.

MicrosoftOffice Mobile for Android, displaying an Excel worksheet.

In general, Office Mobile for Android and Office Mobile for iPhone should function quite similarly, with two exceptions: Android users can not sign up for Office 365 within the app itself, and Android users may need to fully qualify documents that are accessed via an on-premise SharePoint server.

To date, however, Microsoft has been keenly cognizant that productivity apps are the foundation of the Windows platform, and users who purchase a Windows Phone will have these benefits:

Office Mobile will be preinstalled and activated;users will be able to save documents to the phone itself, as well as SkyDrive or email;WP users will be able to filter and search for documents;Users can also easily open documents with permissions attached to them.

Office 365 includes a license of up to five mobile devices—but Windows Phones don’t count against that limit.

The biggest annoyance, however, is that—like the iPad—tablets aren’t supported in either Office Mobile for the iPhone or the Android version, either. Those trying to hunt and peck at keys in the back of a jouncing taxi are likely to grit their teeth and muddle through; by doing so, however, Microsoft is tacitly encouraging customers in the direction of a Surface tablet—now at a new low, low, price—or even a full-fledged Windows 8 PC. (“Phablets” like the Samsung Galaxy Note II should still be supported, however.)

“If you have an iPad or Android tablet, we recommend using the Office Web Apps, which provide the best Office experience on a tablet,” a spokeswoman for Microsoft said via email. “We have made lots of enhancements to Office Web Apps including a touch experience for tablet users.”

QuickOffice Pro provides one tablet-friendly alternative to Office Mobile for Android.

Microsoft also has native apps for OneNote, Lync, and SharePoint, in addition to supporting Exchange Active Sync for email, calendar and contacts, she said.

”I’m not sure how many people are going to want to do a lot of Office work on a phone,” Michael Silver, an analyst at Gartner, said recently. “A tablet’s going to be a lot more important.”

Of course, there’s no reason that users have to live in the world that Microsoft has created. Plenty of Android office apps allow document creation or editing, both on a phone or tablet: Google Drive, of course, allows for Google’s own documents to be created; and Google’s own QuickOffice, Documents to Go, and OfficeSuite Pro 7 are all arguably as good or better choices than Microsoft’s offerings.

In one way, editing or creating an Office document on a mobile phone is counter-intuitive; too many people still append some sort of signature file on a mobile phone to explain away any typos or shorthand.

Within a business document, however, typos simply shouldn’t appear. Office Mobile can certainly stand in to enable last-minute changes while on the go, but they shouldn’t be considered as serious tools for document creation. And that’s exactly how Microsoft appears to want it.

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Put Office on the iPad for tablet success, analyst advises

Armed with a $900 million argument, an analyst has raised the Office-on-iPad banner, saying that the flop of the Surface RT gives Microsoft a chance to make billions in lemonade from its lemon.

" 'Protecting' Windows RT by keeping Office off of Apple's iPad and Android tablets isn't working," said J.P. Gownder, a principal analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, in a recent blog. "It's instead creating risk for Office as users find other ways of getting things done."

Gownder tied Microsoft's recent $900 million write-down of the Surface RT by Microsoft to a renewed call for the company to sell its ubiquitous productivity suite on rivals' tablets.

"The biggest asset Windows RT has is actually based on an app that Microsoft hasn't released—Office for Apple's iPad," Gownder wrote, referring to the operating system that powers the Surface RT. Windows RT bundles Office Home & Student 2013 RT, which includes touch-based versions of Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint and Word that run in a special "desktop" mode.

Outlook will join that roster this fall when Microsoft ships Windows 8.1 for RT.

Gownder's unsolicited advice to Microsoft wasn't out of the blue; a horde of analysts and pundits have called on the Redmond, Washington, software company to pull the trigger on Office for tablets powered by Apple's iOS or Google's Android.

But last week's $900 million write-down, which Microsoft said was to cover steep discounts and excess inventory, was the proof that the software giant's Windows RT/Surface RT pitch had fallen on deaf ears.

In turn, that made Microsoft's presumed strategy of withholding Office from other tablet platforms indefensible.

Microsoft's beleaguered Surface RT

But Gownder, like other analysts before him, also pointed out that Microsoft may have already missed an opportunity. "Microsoft's problem [is that] workers and consumers are already exceptionally productive with their tablets. [And] there's a hidden danger of holding out on Office for iPad and Android tablets—competitors tend to fill the gap and users establish different habits," Gownder said.

He cited examples, including Apple's iWork—which Apple will take to the Web later this year—Google's Quickoffice, Evernote and other mobile apps that users have taken up in the absence of Office.

Gownder contended that Microsoft could recoup its Surface RT losses, and make more besides, if it offered Office on iPad. "If 10 percent of the 140 million iPad owners bought Office for $99.99, Microsoft would earn $1.4 billion in top line revenue, or $500 million more than the Windows RT write-down last quarter," he said.

Gownder may have based his math on the $100 annual subscription price for Office 365 Home Premium, the consumer-grade Office rent-not-buy plan. Assuming Microsoft does deliver Office for the iPad and Android tablets, it will most likely follow the same strategy it used last month for Office Mobile on the iPhone, requiring a valid Office 365 account to run the app.

Others have recently called on Microsoft to focus less on Windows and more on other parts of its portfolio, including Office, in light of last week's 6 percent decline in Windows Division revenue, the $900 million Surface RT charge and the continued slide in PC shipments.

"Documents remain essential and ubiquitous to all of the world outside of Silicon Valley," noted Ben Thompson, until earlier this month a partner marketing manager in Microsoft's Windows app team. Thompson now writes on his Stratechery website. "An independent Office division should be delivering experiences on every meaningful platform. Office 365 is a great start that would be even better with a version for iPad."

In Microsoft's recent corporate reorganization, however, Office will not be an independent division—it is, more or less, in the current structure—but will instead be within the new Applications and Services Engineering Group, which will include Office, Microsoft's Bing search engine and Skype.

The company may well decide to continue resisting the potential of new Office revenue to keep Windows afloat. In the quarter that ended June 30, the Microsoft Business Division (MBD), whose biggest money maker is Office, recorded revenue of $6.43 billion, 1.7% more than the same period the year before, largely on sales to enterprises and in the face of a dismal quarter in PC shipments.

Microsoft may think the at-hand revenue is the smarter choice than more money accompanied by the risk of damaging Windows 8's tablet chances. But that would be a mistake.

"By ceding ground to competing [productivity] apps, Microsoft is encouraging users to investigate other platforms," Gownder said.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news.
More by Gregg Keizer, Computerworld

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