I will always remember being in Chicago on March 27, 2014, for ABA TECHSHOW. Before that date, to work with a Microsoft Word file on an iPhone or iPad you had to use a third-party app, and while some were better than others, none offered the full features of Microsoft Word. But on that date, Microsoft released Microsoft Word for iPad (along with Excel and PowerPoint for iPad), vastly increasing the usefulness of an iPad for attorneys. Suddenly it was possible to edit documents using a real version of MS Word, including adding and reviewing redline edits. Later that year, Microsoft updated the app to work on the iPhone as well as the iPad. Since 2014, Microsoft has improved the app every year. It’s still missing a few features that I would love to see, such as full support for Styles, but nevertheless, Microsoft Word is one of the most useful apps on my iPhone and iPad and I consider it an essential app for attorneys looking to get work done with a mobile device.
Yesterday, Microsoft made an announcement that baffles me. According to a post on the Microsoft Office Apps Blog, Microsoft will soon release a new mobile app called Office which combines Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into a single app. Thus, if you open up a Word document in the app you will have all of the features of Word, open an Excel document in the app and you will get all of the features of Excel, etc. The Office app will also incorporate features of the Microsoft Lens app, which is an app that you can use to scan documents to create a PDF file and/or a document that can be edited in Microsoft Word. So the idea is that you could use the Office app to scan a document, and then you could edit that document in Microsoft Word.
I read the blog post multiple times, and yet I still don’t see an explanation for why it is better to have a single app instead of multiple apps. It’s not like people look at a spreadsheet document and are confused about whether one needs to use Word, Excel, or PowerPoint to edit it. If I’m working on a Word document, why would I want the same app to include Excel features? If I’m working on a PowerPoint slide, how does it help me for the same app to also handle Word and Excel? I just don’t get it.
The announcement of this app reminds me of mid-2013, when Microsoft released its first app for the iPhone. It was called Microsoft Office Mobile for iPhone, and here is my review. That app was just a viewer app, so you could use it to look at a Word or Excel file, but you couldn’t edit the file. Nor could you see footnotes. Nor could you see redline edits in a file when the track changes feature was activated. While it was nice to see Microsoft doing something on iOS, my review concluded that the app was too limited to be of much use.
The upcoming Office mobile app will not have those same limitations, but it is yet another attempt at a jack-of-all-trades app that leaves me confused. Fortunately, for now, Microsoft says that the stand-alone mobile apps will remain: “We know many people are probably wondering, what does this mean for the current mobile apps? In short, we will continue to support and invest in the existing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint mobile apps. We are proud that millions of people use and depend on these apps every day and we believe everyone should decide which experience works best for them on their phones.”
As long as Microsoft continues to maintain its separate apps, then I suppose it doesn’t matter if Microsoft also has an Office app. But I do worry about Microsoft devoting time and energy to this new Office app when Microsoft could instead have its engineers working on making improvements to the current apps, such as adding full support for Styles in the Word app.