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Microsoft Office has been available on iPhone, iPad, and Android for years, giving you an easy way to quickly view and edit documents on the go. Office on Android is now rolling out a new way to sort all your files, following similar updates on Apple devices.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were originally separate apps on smartphones and tablets, but Microsoft rolled them into a single ‘Office Mobile’ app in 2019. The combined app has a home page for quick access to recent files, but most Sometimes, you had to use search or the file manager to actually find what you were looking for.
Microsoft has now updated the Android app’s home page with a new quick access bar at the top, with buttons to switch between media (images and videos), PDF documents, Word files, and other categories. There are also options based on your recent activity: you can quickly filter between recently opened files, shared documents, and files you’ve opened. Best of all, you can customize which buttons appear on the quick access bar.
Filtering results by file type and recent activity has been an option in Google Drive and other services for a while, but it’s great to see the functionality in the Office app as well. Microsoft is also implementing a new PDF button in the bottom bar of the home page, which opens a menu to scan a PDF or convert a series of images/documents to a PDF. Scanning a real-life document into a PDF was already available from the “Scan” button (or the separate Microsoft Lens app on iOS and Android), but the new button is a bit clearer for people new to it.
Microsoft updated the Office app on iOS earlier this year with similar options. The same PDF button arrived in March, and some (but not all) of the same filtering options on the home page were first implemented in February.
The new functionality isn’t available on my devices yet, but Microsoft says it will be implemented in the latest version 16.0.15225.20024. If you have an Android device and don’t want to wait, you can join the beta program on Google Play to receive new updates before they’re ready for everyone; however, beware of errors.
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