Newsletter
Microsoft has begun to push out an update today to its Word, Excel, and PowerPoint applications on Android which improves both sharing and collaboration to help make users even more productive when using these services. As with all app updates, plenty of users will end up seeing these changes quite quickly but it’s still entirely possible that not all users who have these apps installed will see the updates come through today. Having said that, the updates are live and have been pushed out to the Play Store so if you don’t have automatic updates enabled you may want to check and see if the update is available for you to install.
While today’s update focuses on sharing and collaboration, the underlying benefit of these improvements is efficiency, a trend which is continuing from other recent updates to these apps where Microsoft made it possible to add shortcuts to specific files to a device’s home screen. Today’s update specifically introduces a new feature that’s called “share with me,” which lets users track down and open files that have been shared with them by other users whether it be friends, family, or colleagues. This is of course just one change in the handful of improvements.
Alongside the share with me feature, it’s now possible to share your documents faster, and if anyone you’ve shared it with is working on that document after it’s been made accessible to them you can now see when their making any edits or changes. Both this new collaboration improvement as well as the share with me feature are incorporated into all three apps, while PowerPoint itself has two more features that were enabled as exclusives in today’s update. This includes a refreshed design that Microsoft states will make it easier to view and read presentations on your phone, as well as the capability to drag and drop slides if you need to do some reorganizing and the ability to edit presentations with a double-tap gesture. Lastly, PowerPoint also now allows users to search for any text within a presentation using a newly added “find” icon that is located in the ribbon, which should make pinpointing specific pieces of the presentation much faster.