Microsoft Office Mobile for iPhone has now been released in the UK and is available at no extra charge for Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium and Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus subscribers. It requires at least an iPhone 4, iPad 3 or iPad mini running iOS 6.1 or later.
You can view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents and the content and formatting should stay intact so the document will look correctly formatted when you’re back on your PC or Mac. From the home page you can move between your recent documents, open any document from your cloud storage locations, create a new Office document, and update your settings. The cloud storage locations include SkyDrive, Office 365 SharePoint and your businesses SharePoint sites.
If you’re an Office 365 Home Premium subscriber, you can activate Office on multiple iPhones in your family. You would first sign in with your Microsoft Account on each device to activate Office Mobile on that device. Then you will “reset Office” to remove your account information and allow your family member to sign in with their Microsoft Account – so they can access, view, and edit Office documents from their SkyDrive. This is how Office Mobile will become customized for each person in the family.
This is the first release of the Office applications for Apple iPhone and it does seem a little clunky but I am confident that future releases will improve the experience. Microsoft do not recommend this app for the iPad but suggest the Office Web Apps, I think iPad users would get a better and more intuitive experience with a dedicated app to access their Microsoft formatted files rather than having to switch between different web portals.
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