Office on Android: How to read and edit all your Word and Excel documents with one app

Last November, Microsoft unveiled its plan to unify Office mobile applications into a single application. Offered in public preview for several months, Office for Android is now available in a stable version for all users.

The application, which combines Word, Excel and PowerPoint, also includes Office Lens, the tool for scanning documents using the smartphone’s camera, and Notes, the utility for creating small sticky notes.

If the documents created in the application are stored locally on the device, it is also possible to configure a Microsoft account in order to synchronize everything. But Office on Android offers more than just creating and editing office documents. Microsoft has indeed chosen to integrate a number of additional functions (file transfer, extracting content from an image, creating PDFs, etc.) which make it the most efficient productivity application at the moment.

Here’s everything you need to know to create, open, and edit all your documents in Office for Android.

• Download Office for Android (Free)

1. Connect your Microsoft account

This step is optional, but connecting your Microsoft account to Office for Android will do you a lot of favor.

The files you create on your smartphone will not only be stored locally on your device, but they will also be backed up to the OneDrive storage space associated with your account. You will also be able to access your email attachments as well as your notes.

To connect your Microsoft account, open Office, tap the profile icon at the top left, and tap Connect account.

Enter your username and password and validate. You should instantly see all the documents stored on your OneDrive space in the app.

2. Change the default save location

This step is not compulsory, but strongly recommended. It will allow you, for example, to define the display mode of your documents, but above all to configure the default save location.

Open Office, tap on your profile and go to Settings. Under the File Preferences heading, enter the Default Storage Location menu. The application is configured to natively save all your documents on your OneDrive space and on your smartphone.

But it is quite possible to connect another Cloud location to it, other than OneDrive. Tap Add a location and connect your other online storage spaces.

3. Browse the files

The Office home page displays the documents with which you most recently interacted by default. Locally stored documents can be recognized by the small icon of a green smartphone, while documents stored in the cloud display a small cloud that can be simply pressed to load the document locally.

To browse through the various recent files, press the Home drop-down menu at the top of the window to select the type of document you are looking for. To browse your different storage spaces, tap the folder icon at the top right.

Next to each of your files, the options button lets you share the document, share it as a PDF, or remove it from the list.

4. Create or edit a document

Editing an existing document will be done simply by pressing it to open it. To create a new document, go back to the Office home page and press the + button. Three choices are offered:

• Notes: for quick note taking
• Lens: to scan a document with Office Lens
• Documents: to access Word, Excel and PowerPoint

For these three tools, you will be able, as on a PC, to choose to create a blank document or to use an existing template. But each also incorporates another possibility.

On Word, it is possible to create a document by extracting text from an image using the Analyze text option, which is just an OCR function. You will have to remember to crop the selection well in order to analyze only the text areas, otherwise Word will also display pieces of image in your document. The generated document should then display the text extracted from the image, as well as the image, which can be deleted, at the bottom of the page.

Likewise, Analyze Table will generate an Excel table from the photo of an existing table.

Finally, it will be possible to generate a PowerPoint presentation template by selecting Choose images to select images stored on your device. The presentation will then include as many slides as the images chosen.

For better readability of your documents, you can choose to use the mobile display, which is clearer on small screens.

At the bottom of the window, you will find the toolbar specific to each application to edit and layout your documents as from the desktop version of the application. Then save your documents by pressing the small check mark grafted at the top left of the interface.

5. Use Actions

In addition to unifying the tools of the Office office suite in a single application, Microsoft had the very good idea of ​​integrating Actions. These small functions can be used independently of office tools.

From the Office home page, just tap Actions to discover them:

• Transfer files: allows you to transfer files between your smartphone and your PC. To work, you just need to pair your smartphone and your PC by scanning a QR Code displayed on your computer by going to transfer.office.com. The PC’s web browser then serves as an interface to send / receive files between the smartphone and the PC.
• Share nearby: allows you to quickly share documents with another nearby Android smartphone. The two devices just need to activate the Share nearby feature from Office to easily exchange documents.
• Image to Text: Similar to the built-in feature of Word, Image to Text lets you extract text displayed on a photo on the fly. Just take a picture of the document, crop the area from which you want to extract the text and validate. Office then displays a pop-up allowing you to copy the content to the clipboard to paste it elsewhere, or to share it.
• Table image: same principle as in Excel. This function proposes to extract a table from an image to edit it in Excel or to copy it directly to the device’s clipboard to paste it into another tool.
• Sign a PDF: allows you to open a file in PDF format to add a handwritten signature. To do this, you will need to tap on the area of ​​the document where you want to sign. The smartphone will then switch to landscape mode to allow you to create your handwritten signature by signing with your finger. The signature can then be moved and resized to suit your needs.
• Scan to PDF: Lets you scan a document on the fly to PDF for immediate saving or sharing.
• Images in PDF format: allows you to generate a PDF file from the images stored on your phone, with the possibility of annotating it, to save or share it.
• Document to PDF: Quickly convert any Office document stored on your device or in the cloud.
• Scan QR Code: opens the QR scanner and saves a note containing the scanned link.