Microsoft has officially announced the release of the Office's apps. Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps have been on preview for the last few months, and the company has finally launch their final versions.
As the preview versions, all the office's apps are free to download for android tablets (although they are not available for phones). The only requirement for the apps to run smoothly is 1 GB of RAM and an ARM processor. They officially works fine with Android 4.4 KitKat, although Lollipop is expected to be fine too.
As in the preview versions, some features are disabled in the free app, and you will need an Office 365 subscription to use those premium options. However, all the basic ones are available with the basic free version.
Microsoft described the apps as “unmistakably Office, while optimized for Android tablets”. They have design the Office apps to be used comfortably with touch controls, despite being perfectly compatible with external keyboards.
In addition to these final versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, Microsoft has also launched Outlook preview today. The apps are fully compatible with tablets and phones, and you can already download them from the Play Store (Word, Excel and PowerPoint).
Outlook app is designed to handle our overload mails as efficiently as possible. In order to reduce the number of mail in the inbox, the new app presents two different tabs for the incoming messages, Focused and Other. So, the important mails can be found on the focused inbox while the rest are stored on the Other tab.
There are also some customizable swipe gestures for a quicker use. With a single movement we can archive, delete, flag, move mark as read or unread, or schedule the mails to come back to them later. Outlook also include a predictive search for emails, people and files, and you can view the people that you used to write more often.
The mail works with different accounts, including Office 365, Outlook.com, iCloud, Exchange, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. It's also integrated with the calendar, so the scheduled events are directly accessible from the mail.
There are also a lot of other features available, such as an easy file attachment system, inbox filters, quick searches and the possibility to see recent meetings, communication and files.
As the app is still in preview mode, Microsoft encourage their users to submit feedback about their experience with Outlook as well as their suggestions for improvements.
Outlook is available for free for mobile phones and tablets running iOS and Android OS. You can download Outlook Preview from the App Store and the Google Play respectively.
