After many rumors and much anticipation, Microsoft is finally bringing Office to iOS. Well, that is, to the iPhone; there's still no native iPad app, and it's only available if you have an Office 365 subscription.
On Friday, Microsoft released the Office Mobile app for iPhone with little fanfare, making the document-creating package available in the Apple iTunes App Store. A version of Office much like Office Mobile for Windows Phone, this release will not fulfill many of the "full-fledged Office for iOS" dreams that people have been pining for, but at least it's a start. It's compatible with iPhone 4 and up, as well as iPad and the fifth generation iPod Touch, though it's not native to the iPad or optimized for anything except the iPhone 5. The app requires iOS 6.1 or later to run. And it also requires an Office 365 subscription. But if you fit all of those requirements, here's what you'll get.
The app is free — not counting the Office 365 subscription — but, as you would suspect, pretty large at 58MB. Once you download it and sign in to your Office 365 account, you can view, edit, and save Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents from your iPhone. Microsoft is promising a consistent Office experience on the small screen. It will keep all of your content and formatting intact so that when you view your altered documents back on a desktop, it's not a mess. Here's what some of the features will look like.
Getting Started
When you open Office Mobile, you can access content in the cloud, such as on SkyDrive or Office 365 SharePoint, or documents sent to you in an email. Recent Documents will automatically include the last documents you worked on from your desktop computer or other devices running Office Mobile.
You can also create new Word or Excel documents, though creating new PowerPoint documents is not supported (but for the small screen, that makes sense). The New Document screen will provide some of the most basic and useful templates to help you get the ball rolling.
Word
This will probably be your most used part of Office Mobile, and it looks like it was converted well to the small screen. There's a feature called "Resume Reading" that tracks where you were working on a Word file, so that when you open them back up from the cloud, Word will bring you back to the part of the document you were working on, eliminating what could be hours of accumulated scrolling and searching. The menu options on Word are simple, which is good, because you're probably not looking to finalize your document on the go, but just edit and add to it. In the menu, there's File Options, Editing Tools, and Viewing Tools. File Options simply lets you Save, Save As, or Share in the cloud.
Editing Tools gives you a relatively simple formatting pallet, with Bold, Italics, Underline, and Strikethrough, along with font size and highlighting options for notes. Viewing Tools is another one of those optimizations for Mobile, letting you skip to different sections of a long document.
PowerPoint
Though you can't do much with the images of a PowerPoint presentation, you can edit the speaker notes and the order of the slides. Portrait mode gives you a preview of the presentation with the speaker notes at the bottom, while landscape mode gives you just the slides. For jumping between slides, there's a kind of gallery overview with the Slide Editor.
Excel
Probably the most complicated tool in Office Mobile, you can work with workbooks, worksheets, graphs, charts, and AutoSum with your iPhone. It still has the same three simple menu options as Word — File Option, Viewing Tools, and Editing Tools — but within the document, there's a lot more going on. You can tab through various parts of Excel, or use the Viewing Tools menu to browse through the outline, apply a filter, search, or sort through the document to get where you need to go.
Table functions can be put together with the AutoSum feature, giving you a quick statistical overview of whatever you've highlighted, and the same selected tables can be turned into charts. The same kind of commenting and formatting options as Word are available on Excel, too.
While Office for iPhone is something that some Apple users have been waiting for, there's still the gaping omission of an iPad-optimized app. Office Mobile can work on iPad, but Microsoft says that you have to either work in small screen mode or 2X scaled up, and suggests that you use Office Web Apps, Microsoft's cloud-based document editing software, which has been unimpressive, but accessible by the iPad for a while.
It's probably worth mentioning that Microsoft may be iPad-shy because it wants a competing tablet/laptop hybrid, the Microsoft Surface, to do better than it is now. It seems like only a matter of time before they're forced by demand and common sense to make an iPad app, but don't hold your breath for now. Instead, use your iPhone and your Office 365 subscription to get some work done, and if you don't have Office 365, just bite the bullet and get used to using iWork.