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Microsoft boosts Office products on Android and iOS

Coming off of the preview of Office for Windows 10 with a universal app and optimized for touch interfaces, Microsoft announced the general availability of several Office products for Android tablets. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Android lost the ‘Preview’ tag in their title and are now available from the Google Play Store:

When you use the apps for personal use, core editing is free and premium features require a qualifying Office 365 subscription. When used for commercial use, you need a qualifying Office 365 subscription for editing and premium features.

The current system requirements for Office on Android tablet are: devices of screen sizes 7 inches or larger (a device with screen size greater than 10.1 inches will require an Office 365 subscription to create and edit), with an ARM based processor and 1 GB RAM or above. Today, the Android OS version that is supported is KitKat4.4.x. While you can use the apps on an Android tablet running Lollipop, it is not supported at this time but will be in a subsequent update. Microsoft is also committed to supporting Android devices with Intel chips via a native implementation that will be available within a quarter.

Additionally, Microsoft also announced a Microsoft Outlook app for iOS and Android in its preview stages. The app shares a very similar look and feel to the desktop application of Outlook.

I currently use the OWA for Android Preview app on my phone but I will have to check out Outlook to see if it is more responsive and also supports shared calendars.

See these Microsoft announcements for more details and preview information: