App of the Week - Office
What is better than a free app? A free really great app! This week’s review is about an app that I love and that come for free and even preinstalled on every Windows Phone 7: Office.
Sounds “déjà vu” but this app really takes Office a step further on the mobile with some really cleverly implemented features.
When you first get your Windows Phone you are eager to set up all your social network accounts, Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live and LinkedIn. Their seamless integration into the phone’s system can make you spend hours chatting with friends or watching those pictures from the latest party you went to. But you can’t have fun forever and sometimes you have to get back to work right? ;-)
When you are on the go and need to quickly get through your PowerPoint presentation one more time before arriving at a conference, this app is up for the job. It opens any PowerPoint document and renders it faithfully, pictures, charts, texts, transitions everything is there. You can even edit the texts, add notes or hide slides. It can sound like a drawback that you can’t add slides or move pictures but do you really want to edit on your phone a document that will be shown on 5 m wide screen?
Word and Excel on the other hand have all the features you would expect to have on a phone. When you open a Word document for example the presentation of the file is optimized to fit the screen and make it convenient to read and edit. Of course you can add bullet points, style your text or quickly add pictures with your camera. When it comes to Excel, you have the same convenient presentation. If you have a document with a lot of data and filters in the columns: no problem, you can sort and filter on the phone to.
OneNote completes the package and is the app I use the most by far. You can keep track of your notes and tasks and even open embedded documents without problem. If you are inspired on the go you can add pictures and voice recordings to your notes very easily. If you have notebooks you use more often, you can pin them to the start screen so you always have them easily accessible.
By now you must wonder… “How do I get all those documents on and off the phone?” No worries there! Of course you can open the documents from an e-mail and once you are done send them right back… but it doesn’t sound very effective right? That’s why, as for the Desktop version, this Office version integrates a transparent connection to SkyDrive, SharePoint and Office 365.
With these services you can open, edit and save documents right in cloud. You have your files always with you at the latest version and it is easy to collaborate on them with colleagues. If you haven’t tried already, go do it, SkyDrive is free with your Live ID account.
To sum it up I think Office is a very useful app that was cleverly designed to be used on a phone. For people like me it will become THE app to use every day, for others it might save your day that one time when you really need it ;-) Just remember it’s already there on your phone, for free (!), why not give it a try?
Do you have any tips about Office and its SkyDrive integration? Did you know all you could do with it? Do you have any questions? Feel free to comment.