Office Mobile for Office 365 Subscribers (for iPhone)

Six years after the iPhone debuted?six long years during which time Microsoft Office users were stuck without their primary office suite on one of the most popular mobile devices ever sold?the company from Redmond was birthed into the iTunes App Store the inelegantly named "Office Mobile for Office 365 Subscribers" (for iPhone). For me, the app came too little too late. In the long time when there was no Microsoft Office app, I had already considered all my other options, from Apple's own iWork mobile apps to Polaris Office (for iPhone), our Editors' Choice for full office suites. I dabbled in Quickoffice Pro HD, too, and have mostly come to rely on a little collection of free alternatives, including Evernote's iPhone app for writing and Google Drive running in the browser for spreadsheets and presentations, which I don't touch all too often on mobile devices in the first place.

Microsoft's app rolls Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into one, creating a pretty tight experience. The app is fast. Documents load from SkyDrive with notable speed. And Microsoft does well making use of the tiny screen space. You'll find essential features you want, such as basic text formatting tools and commonly use Excel functions, but only a tiny fraction of the buttons, menus, and icons that smother?er, grace the desktop apps.

What's Required?
The iPhone app requires an Office 365 subscription, the low-end of which (Microsoft Office 365 Home Personal?) costs $99 per year, although that includes installation on up to five devices. The iPhone app doesn't count as one of your five, and that's a huge bonus. The app performs well, although it really only works if you to save all your important flies to SkyDrive. Microsoft will need to integrate with other big-name file-syncing programs, such as Dropbox, if it wants its customers to stick around, though. Office users who already sync all their documents through another service might not be willing to switch to SkyDrive just to use Office on iPhone, especially when so many of the alternative mobile office suites do connect to Drobox, Box, SugarSync, and the like.

Office on iPhone: The Basics
As mentioned, The Office Mobile for Office 365 Subscribers app gives you three programs: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The design is such that you don't need to think about which program you're using, though. Rather, you open an existing document from SkyDrive or an email attachment, and let the app choose the program needed to run it. If you start a new document, you're faced with a couple of choices: start a new Word or Excel document, or pick from popular templates, such as an agenda or report in Word or a budget or event schedule in Excel. You can't create PowerPoint presentations in the app, although you can open to view or edit existing ones.

The bottom of the screen offers a simple menu, with Recent, Open, New, and Settings. Settings are disappointing because there are no settings, just a "reset" button and links to information such as help, terms of service, and a privacy statement.

What Works
Microsoft has done an exceptional job with the design in the sense that the app gives you enough of the tools you need without bombarding you with ones you don't. For example, you can add comments to a document?crucial, especially when you're on the go?but you don't have access to the full range of track changes features. Similarly, Excel provides some commonly used functions via a quick access menu, but nowhere close to all those that you'll find in the desktop app.

Opening files from SkyDrive happens noticeably fast. You can also open files from email attachments by choosing Office Mobile when prompted. The app doesn't require a constant connection to the Internet to work, too, which helps keeps it running quickly and smoothly as you edit or create documents. Recently opened files save locally so that you can continue working if the signal drops or you need to be offline for a bit. And all your work saves to SkyDrive the next time you connect to the Internet.

What Doesn't Work
I'm not crazy about the fact that the app requires a Microsoft Office 365 subscription to work primarily because the apps in SkyDrive are free. Why are they free to use in a browser but cost a hundred bucks a year on a mobile device?

I'm also anxious to see Office Mobile work with more apps. For example, there's no way to open an email attachment that arrives from any mail app other than Apple's own bundled Mail, such as Gmail or the Mailbox app. I want to be able to open documents from my Dropbox and SugarSync accounts, too. Hopefully, integration of that level will arrive soon.

Minor annoyances crop up here and there, such as the inability to move the location of an image on a Word document. In trying to edit some text, I put my finger where I wanted the cursor and waited for the two selection markers to appear, as they always do in every Apple app that includes text editing. They never appeared. In Office, you have double tap to select a whole word before the selection markers show up. Viewing options are good, though minimal. It would make sense to me to add to the Settings (which I already pointed out don't contain any settings) the ability to select, say, up to three views that you would like for your particular app. Likewise, I'd like a setting that allows me to change my default save location to a syncing service other than SkyDrive.

A Good Start, But is Office on iPhone Compelling?
Office Mobile is a good starting point for an iPhone version of Microsoft Office, even if it is years later coming to market than it should have been. In a marketplace where free alternatives are now very good, Office Mobile for iPhone seems like it will appeal more to the business community who already use and pay for office anyway more than any other?and even then, only if they use SkyDrive. The app is fast and works well, but it's not as good as other options. Cheaper alternatives that integrate with other apps and services, like our Editor's Choice Polaris Office, or a combination of free tools that also play nice with others, are just more appealing.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/8QMtfNFSSX0/0,2817,2420537,00.asp

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