Microsoft is continuing its efforts to bring as many desktop features to its mobile apps.
The latest updates for Microsoft Office Word, PowerPoint and Excel for Android bring rich text format (RTF) support, exporting to PDF and the ability to insert images into a document straight from the camera.
With these three added features, RTF support falls into the category of one of those things we didn't know we couldn't do in the first place. As for exporting PDFs, that's a feature that's been needed for quite a while that should've been there in the first place. Meanwhile, inserting images into documents straight from the gallery is a nice-to-have feature considering it is unique to a mobile environment.
There is a bit of catch, however, to actually making use of the new features. Users have to be online. Based on Microsoft's support page, the limitations also seem to apply to Android users only. Microsoft Office users on iOS can open and edit RTF files offline, for example.
When creating a document in Office Word and exporting it into a PDF, the conversion has to occur on Microsoft's servers. Thus, the requirement to be online to do so. It is a bit of a peculiarity of a requirement nonetheless, as it could lead to security and privacy vulnerabilities for users.
Regardless, PDF export is the most useful of the three new added features. Especially with the proliferation of multiple office suite apps on the Google Play Store, exporting to a universal file type like PDFs allows for documents to be opened on a variety of applications. Users won't have to worry if their polished document is formatted correctly when opened on a different app for a different platform.
The only worry would be to remember to complete any conversions before losing access to the Internet. Working on a document on a tablet during a flight, for example, is one such situation but it is better than nothing after all.
Currently, all three apps - Word, PowerPoint and Excel - have 4.4 ratings out of 5 stars on the Google Play Store, and the current versions after the updates bring each to version 16.0.6729.1013. If the updates haven't already rolled out to a user, Microsoft does provide an APK mirror to force the latest update, as well.
