You Can Now Use Microsoft Office on Your Android Phone – for Free

Dan Tynan
Updated
image

(Microsoft)

Android phandroids, your long wait is finally over. Microsoft’s mainstay productivity suite is finally available on Google-flavored phones.

Tacitly acknowledging that nobody is going to switch to Windows Phone just so they can edit PowerPoint presentations with their thumbs, Microsoft today officially made Office available for Android phones, free of charge. (It has been available for Android tablets since February.) A preview version has been available in the Google Play store since mid-May.

Now you can take your weighty Word docs, impressive Excel spreadsheets, and scintillating PowerPoint presentations with you, edit them on your Android phone, and then share all that Microsofty goodness with your colleagues. When you open the files on your computer, all your changes will be there, formatted correctly.

For that to work, of course, you’ll need to store your docs in the cloud. Office for Android phone can connect to most of the major cloud storage services, including Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, and Microsoft’s Sharepoint or OneDrive (obviously), but not iCloud.

Microsoft is making this version of Office free for personal use. If you want to use it commercially, you’ll need a paid subscription to Office 365 (at $10  a month, or $100 per year). The premium version will also give you a handful of extra features in Android Office, such as the ability to track edit changes in Word or annotate slides using PowerPoint Ink and save the information.

image

You can manually annotate PowerPoint slides with ‘Ink’ for free, but saving annotations is going to cost you. (Microsoft)

Office for Android Phones will work on Android handsets running KitKat (Android 4.4) and Lollipop (5.x); Microsoft says it will also support Google’s upcoming version of Android, known today only as “M,” when it becomes available. Office will come preloaded on Android phones from major handset makers — such as Samsung, LG, and Sony — later this year.

Send email to Dan Tynan here or follow him on Twitter.