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Microsoft IT

Microsoft's Office App That Replaces Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Hits General Availability (venturebeat.com) 41

Posted by msmash from the for-what-it-is-worth dept.
Microsoft today launched Office for Android and iOS in general availability. The unified app means you no longer need to download, install, and switch between the individual Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps. From a report: The company today also announced new features coming to the app this spring: Word Dictation, Excel Cards View, and Outline to PowerPoint. You can use Office for free, and if you sign in with a Microsoft Account or connect a third-party storage service you can access and store documents in the cloud. Microsoft has over 200 million monthly active Office 365 business users and over 37 million Office 365 consumer subscribers. When the company launched the new Office mobile app as a public preview in November, "tens of thousands of people" rushed to try it. Microsoft has found that most users and businesses want to use the Office app as a hub or starting point for all their document work.
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Microsoft's Office App That Replaces Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Hits General Availability More

Microsoft's Office App That Replaces Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Hits General Availability

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  • While I know the first thing ./ is race to dogpile MS, I frequently use MS apps from my mobile device and look forward to this.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Whilst I frequently died just a little when forced to use an MS app. Most unintuitive pile of rat droppings to little the software world.

    • To be honest, the only app I have used was outlook which garnered positive reviews on launch.

      Clearly not enough of these reviewers had ever used Android or the weath of great email apps that show how poor Microsoft's offering was.

      Been bitten too many times

    • I was just going to post the exact opposite, that running fucking Word on my cellphone holds about as much appeal as building a house by gluing together grains of sand using tweezers. So by extension having it as Office is equally useless.
  • The software is free, the first few GB of onedrive too, that's the lure, the lure that won't hit the casual users too hard, this is oriented towards getting money from companies while leaving the average Joe alone.

    • Average Joe is giving up their data. They're not the customer they're the product. Be it internal use, 3rd party sales, or something. Microsoft isn't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.

  • Nice for casual use (Score:4)

    by twocows ( 1216842 ) on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @12:31PM (#59743314)
    I can see this being very useful to, say, a college student who needs to use Office format for his assignments because that's what one of his professors uses despite the school standardizing on GSuite, or someone submitting a resume to a site that for some ridiculous reason demands it in .doc or .docx despite PDF or, failing that, RTF making a lot more sense. This is doubly true in a world where casual users are starting to trade out their laptops and desktops for just having a smartphone.

    Third party support for Office file formats gets better every year, but there's always that one time it gets it wrong and you look like an idiot for it. Having some kind of gratis option for casual use is actually pretty nice.

  • why (Score:3)

    by cellocgw ( 617879 ) <cellocgw&gmail,com> on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @12:40PM (#59743360) Journal

    Explain why I would want to load and boot up 3 or 4 apps' worth of RAM just to run one of them. What is the point here, other than requiring more clicks to get to where I want to be?

    Now: click on the Word icon. Start typing.

    This New Thing: click on something. Get some dumbass menu or splash page. Figure out what is the word processor. Click on that.

    • That’s my question too - can someone explain the supposed advantage of this approach?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Thatâ(TM)s my question too - can someone explain the supposed advantage of this approach?

        Because switching between apps on Android or iOS generally sucks? Just because you can do it, doesn't make it necessarily fun, especially if the OS unloaded the app midway through and now you have to sit through the startup. Given the high level of integration present (you want to include Excel tables and charts into PowerPoint or Word being the most common things to do) this could get annoying. Whereas if I wanted

    • Because all of them have been integrated into eachother so much, you're pretty much opening the same program with a different layout.
    • The new version of Microsoft Office! Now slower and more complicated!

    • 64GB of DDR4 RAM is $250

      Microsoft word uses 45.1MB of RAM.
      Excel uses 69.5MB of RAM
      Powerpoint uses 51.5MB of RAM.

      That's on average ~100MB of extra RAM being used by loading all 3. (And probably most of that is redundant libraries in each executable but we'll ignore that...)

      $250 / 64,000 = 0.3c / MB * 100MB = 30cents.

      Explain to me why you're so poor that you can't afford 30 cents of RAM?

  • I guess this 'll stop people trying out the Open source equivalent. Put these on a USB and you're portable and your files aren't stored in the Cloud, where anyone and his dog can read them:

    Libre Office [libreoffice.org]

    Open source Resources [opensource.com]

  • Bring back Appleworks!

  • They should name it Microsoft Works (Score:3)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @02:00PM (#59743760)
    It's a unique name that has, of course, never been used before. Otherwise just call it Bob.
    • LOL. I'd mod you up if I had points!
    • There actually was a Microsoft Works [wikipedia.org] for years. It included Word and some pared down other features for $40 or so. They discontinued it in favor of Office 2010 Starter [wikipedia.org] which was even better in that it was free. Then they killed that off when they realized people weren't upgrading to a paid edition like they thought they would.
      • I was being sarcastic. Yes, there were many different Microsoft Works. This product is very similar. There was also a Microsoft Bob.
  • How/why are Office "apps" used on a spy gadget? Excel could only show a few tiny cells. Word couldn't show even a fraction of a printed page. Powerpoint doesn't begin to make sense on a little screen. Outlook does make sense, but only if you break all of the functionality apart into discrete bits and have multiple different interfaces for all of the functions. I use Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook) daily, but I use them all from an actual computer. I can't imagine trying to use them all o

    • Not Office, but I've used Google Docs on my cell phone to do my writing. I can add to my novels/novellas no matter where I am. On a line waiting to place an order? Write a few paragraphs. Sitting in the passenger seat while someone else drives? Write some more. Waiting for my child to get done with an activity where all I need to do otherwise is stand around? More writing.

      Of course, when it's time for publication, I take that writing and use a real word processor to double-check it and format it, but the ab

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kubajz ( 964091 )
      I was amazed to see that my teenagers not only use the mobile version of Office on their phones, but they claim that putting together a school presentation, for example, is much easier for them than doing it in LibreOffice. Go figure, huh?
  • This is a problem I've run across with Android apps (though it would apply to iOS apps as well). You can only have one instance of an app running at a time. If you've got two different spreadsheets, and wish to selectively copy and paste a bunch of data between them, it's a nightmare. You have to load one sheet, copy, load the other sheet, paste, load the first sheet again, copy, load the second sheet again, paste, etc. It's not like desktop OSes which allow you to have multiple instances of the same ap

    • It's not like desktop OSes which allow you to have multiple instances of the same app running simultaneously (so you can have both spreadsheets open at the same time).

      Desktop OSs don't allow you to have multiple instances of the same app running either. What they do actually allow is for you to have multiple windows open at the same time.

  • You can use Office for free

    Wow. It wasn't so many years ago that Microsoft was "discounting" Windows so that they could milk their money from the Office cash cow. Are our personal data and usage habits worth so much more to them that Windows and Office can now be free?

    • You can use Office for free

      Wow. It wasn't so many years ago that Microsoft was "discounting" Windows so that they could milk their money from the Office cash cow. Are our personal data and usage habits worth so much more to them that Windows and Office can now be free?

      I don't think it's quite that. I think that MS is beginning to see the writing on the wall. A generation of kids is growing up on Chromebooks, where e-mail, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations are all free*. Even if they're not immersed in the Googlesphere early on, there are 101 Word/Excel/Powerpoint clones on iOS and Android, most of which are either free* or some $10-$20.

      MS might be able to keep afloat by milking businesses in the same way Oracle does, but like they learned with Windows, when you'

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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