Microsoft Officially Launches Office for Android Phone | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Officially Launches Office for Android Phone

techcrunch.com

145 pointszhuxuefeng1994100 comments

> Office was once tied largely to Windows PCs, but the company today is working to make sure its flagship productivity suite works anywhere its users are – even on competitors’ OS’s.

Huh? Office has been on the Macintosh for decades. This isn't really new.

Heck, Office was on the Mac before it was on Windows.

If I remember right, Excel was released first for Mac

Right, Apple was already a market when Microsoft started to grow. That's maybe how Bill Gates got to have a peek at the GUI effort and PARC source. They have a special relationship.

Apple was big, rich and famous, because of the Apple II. So little Microsoft became the Mac's biggest backer and biggest supplier of software, and Bill Gates was featured at the Mac launch.

Excel and the graphical version of Word were written for the Mac, and PowerPoint -- a Mac program -- was bought in to make the first Microsoft Office suite, which was launched on the Mac.

Gates also offered to help Apple license Mac OS widely to make it an industry standard.

Apple didn't see the point of selling $100 software when it could sell $2,500-$3,500 computers.

That world started to change after 1990, when Windows 3 began to take off.

And Microsoft has been pushing their browser-based Office suite for several years now. I believe it officially support IE, Chrome, Firefox and Safari on all desktop platforms.

We've tried using it at work but found that it's really full of bugs on anything other than IE.

Office on the Mac was called Multiplan in 1984 [1]

Office 1.0 came out November 19, 1990 but Word itself was 1983 [2]

People still used the original VisiCalc in the DOS days. Visicalc itself was an Apple II program [3]

Lotus bought and killed it but botched the transition to Windows, leaving the door open for Excel (ably assisted by the Windows API team no doubt).

[1] http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=AT&p_...

[2] http://toastytech.com/guis/word115.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc

> Office on the Mac was called Multiplan in 1984 [1]

No it wasn't: that's nonsense.

Microsoft wrote some DOS programs in the early 1980s, including Word and Multiplan. Multiplan was a spreadsheet, similar to VisiCalc. It was never Office 1.0.

VisiCalc appeared on the Apple II, Apple III, Tandy TRS-80 and Atari 800. After Lotus launched 1-2-3 and killed VisiCalc, it bought Software Arts and closed it. However, Software Arts was almost dead by then anyway (and Bob Frankston went to work for Lotus). http://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/09/business/lotus-set-to-acqu...

Lotus certainly botched the transition to Windows, partly because it was still making tons of money from 1-2-3 for DOS, and partly because it was best buddies with IBM, and both of them hated Microsoft. That ended happily when IBM bought Lotus Development. (Well, happily for all the executives, not for poor blooming users....)

Office for the Mac was hamstrung in a way that made it usable for home users, but difficult for businesses. There was no Outlook, no Visual Basic, and IIRC: No pivot tables in Excel, no OOXML until 2011 (4 years after Office for Windows), less integration with Microsoft's backend servers (Sharepoint, etc.), and some other missing features. I'm also thinking that Group Policy management didn't work or not as well.

Much of that was later fixed, but for a long time it was another powerful reason for businesses to use Windows.

As a home user of Office on Mac (and therefore didn't bother with these things), I have to ask: What has been fixed, and what hasn't?

Try the Office 2016 Beta for OSX. Its going to be a launch day first class citizen of the Office family, and is a complete UI/UX rewrite to match what Windows does now.

I'm using it, it's ahead of the non-Beta Office that Office 365 currently ships for Windows.

Any word on when that's gonna launch?

My mac users are freaking out because we just switched from gApps to Exchange (I know, don't even) and Outlook 2011 is a joke compared to what my windows peeps are getting. (not to mention the fact that I have to create a second set of instructions just for them)

> we just switched from gApps to Exchange (I know, don't even)

I don't know: Why not switch from Google Apps to Exchange?

Office365 and Office365 for Business's OSX installer already ships the new Outlook by default, Excel and Word and the rest are available as optional downloads, and will ship in the main installer, from what I've heard, early next year.

Compared against Windows' current version of Office, it is a refinement. Compared against Office 2011 for Mac, it is a massive upgrade, like day and night.

We're part of a university and are bound by their license agreements which until July 1st are just for Office 2013 and Office 2011, in a week from today that mercifully changes to Office 365 and a much tighter integration with onedrive for business support and larger mailboxes (until now it's been 8gb a piece) + an easier overall installation process.

With Outlook 2011 for Mac being little more than a rebranded Entourage, long recognized even by Microsoft as not equivalent to Outlook for Windows, it's no wonder your folks are having problems. I've pushed my Mac users to use Apple's Mail.app instead- much less friction than using a program that is Outlook in name only.

Don't be mad. The author's first computer was probably an iPad.

Definitely the best spreadsheet implementation available today when running on a Galaxy S6 - beats out other Android options as well as Office on Windows Phones or iOS, etc. It's actually really usable which is the first time I've thought that for a mobile spreadsheet.

Very nice.

Would you kindly provide details?

I applaude them for finally doing this but I do wonder if it's too late in that I've gotten hooked on GDocs and Drive based on their ease of use. I suppose for corporate users of Office this is great news.

For google docs, sharing is easy, collaboration is stupidly easy. My org has moved to google tools from office and I would say it's for the better. Previously everything was handled through emails and windows network drive (and this from an org with tens of subsidiaries and presence on every inhabited continent). Docs get lost a lot less nowadays. One can scream that content management is old stuff but google made it easy enough for corporate users just to jump aboard without expensive retraining.

That said - oh for the love of god, google docs writer editor is so bloody horrible for anything but simplest of documents and even structuring larger document bases through hyperlinking is awkward.

> google docs writer editor is so bloody horrible

You can thank it to the broken ContentEditable HTML API. Google Docs v1 used it, for v2 Google reinvented the wheel by coding a word processor render engine using one DIVs per line. If only the browser vendors would fix the ContentEditable API, then a Google Docs implementation would need just a few lines of code. Multi column, multi page would be no problem with contenteditable. http://caniuse.com/#feat=contenteditable

Sadly, three of the big four browser vendors have a competitive advantage if their own cloud office suits cannot be reimplemented with a few lines of code.

> If only the browser vendors would fix the ContentEditable API, then a Google Docs implementation would need just a few lines of code.

Google Docs, by nature of its real-time collaboration features, cannot "just" use contentEditable.

Apparently ContentEditable is unfixable:

https://medium.com/medium-eng/why-contenteditable-is-terribl...

Thanks for the link. I wish all serious discussions about software design would take the time to enumerate the axioms (even if only implicit) used in the design.

To me the poor suitability of Google docs to writing traditional technical documentation the most irritating aspect. Automatic table of figures, references, math editor, etc. that have been more or less mainstream in document editors for decades.

> Previously everything was handled through emails and windows network drive (and this from an org with tens of subsidiaries and presence on every inhabited continent).

Have you heard about SharePoint? One of the goals of SharePoint is to solve such kind of problems your org once had.

Have you used Sharepoint? For every problem it "solves" five more are introduced. It is a monolithic nightmare of complexity and suck.

Yes I am using SharePoint at work and I am pretty happy with it. There might be some overhead for the IT dept but from the user's point of view I cannot see the problems it introduced.

Actually, now that you mention it, yes, SharePoint was one ingredient in the soup :) - I don't think SharePoint enabled collaboration was as friction free as through Google drive. Probably depends on the user and SharePoint version how well it works. But what I have observed - previously people would rather use the network drive or email docs than use sharepoint for distribution and now everyone just shares google docs links.

Shouldn't this be "re-launches"? Office Mobile for Android phones has been around for a year or two.

I thought the earlier launch was just for tablets.

Using it on my Nexus 4 for a week or so.

Edit: Now it's telling me to install the standalone apps so I "don't miss out."

I think it's mostly because the previous versions were considered a preview / beta.

Wasn't a beta; it was a totally different app.

It was a Holo app... here's what it looked like: http://www.gsmarena.com/microsoft_releases_office_mobile_for...

It originally required an Office 365 subscription, but they later lifted that requirement.

Really? These are "premium" features requiring a subscription??

• Change page orientation

• Insert page and section breaks

• Highlight table cells with custom color shading

• Enable columns in page layout

I was about to go looking for "what stuff do I need office 365 to do" but you saved me the time!

Sounds like it's best to just keep using google drive.

While Google Docs is good, it's not a replacement for Office if you need to do anything more than basic documentation unfortunately.

Neither is Office for Android when they disable basic functionality like page breaks.

What? Microsoft is asking money for a product so that they can pay their employees ? </sarcasm>

That could be done with one time purchase. But subscription?

No, thanks.

They don't want people paying mobile app prices for their office suite.

Honestly, do you think it's fair to insert INFINITE page breaks forever for just one payment? Those page breaks aren't cheap, you know!

it should be free if you already own office

Why?

Because most of the competition is free regardless of if you have Office? Or perhaps they think they somehow offer more value then every competing tool. They don't to me and my company but some one must be buying it or they wouldn't be selling it for long.

If you pay for office, you should get Office... that pretty much sums it up for me. And perhaps everyone who uses Office won't use Android as their primary content creation device... but I might be wrong.

Microsoft is obligated to its stakeholders (investors and employees) to capture all the value it can for the products it creates. They're not building software out of goodwill. You do have the choice to not buy Office if you don't like the pricing scheme.

you do, but is it the most profitable option for Microsoft is my point

It could fill it with adverts and track you, which is how Google pays for its "free" stuff. Or it could attach it to $1,500 hardware dongles, like Apple.

The Microsoft ecosystem is much more powerful, and works both online and offline, and it's cross-platform (Windows, Android, iOS), but you don't think any of this is worth paying for?

Perhaps you have much more important things to spend your money on. How much is your smartphone costing you? How much do you spend on Spotify, or Starbucks?

How much would you have to pay Google for the 50GB mailbox and 1TB of storage bundled with Office 365?

You pay a one-time fee, you typically get a license to use that software on One Computer.

The benefit of subscriptions is that they typically are more generous with allowing you to use their services on multiple devices (perhaps not simultaneously).

I would say it's similar to saying "I bought Star Wars on VHS, therefor I should get he HD version for free"

The Android version is inferior to the Microsoft PC version .... so if you pay a one-time fee for the HD version, the SD version should definitely be free

If you own a boxed copy of Office I can understand why you don't get this for free. When you buy a boxed copy of Office 201x you should understand that you're buying a perpetual license to that version of Office. Expect it to work and receive bug fixes for a reasonable time (MS do 7 - 10 years of maintenance per major release?). But basically, no freebie big ticket features or upgrades to Office 201x + 1.

If you pay for the subscription, you're paying for a non-perpetual license in return for access to whatever the latest version of Office is. So big ticket features come free.

This is one step closer towards an effective full Office Suite on Linux, which I would be very happy about.

> This is one step closer towards an effective full Office Suite on Linux

Are you referring to Microsoft Office specifically?

LibreOffice is a full-fledged office suite, is feature-complete for just about 99% of things you can do in MS Office, is free (both, as in beer and freedom), and runs very well under Linux.

I've noticed a considerable performance difference between Excel 2013 and the latest LibreOffice Calc, on my dual boot Ubuntu + Win8 PC.

While I'm not saying a Linux port of Office would be just as fast as on Win8, it is a noticeable difference.

> While I'm not saying a Linux port of Office would be just as fast as on Win8

Why would it not be as fast on Linux?

Yes, I was referring to Microsoft Office in the comment.

I've used LibreOffice for years while running Linux before. I noticed perfomance issues compared to Microsoft Office on Windows that were especially bad for spreadsheets.

I consider myself to be a power-user of MS Office. Last time I used LibreOffice, it did not have many of the features that I used extensively (especially in their PowerPoint analog). In addition, the interoperability between MS Office and LibreOffice was not great.

Lastly--there isn't an adequate OneNote replacement on Linux. Evernote doesn't cut it for me. This is really my killer app--if there was a good OneNote on Linux (non-browser, a native desktop app), I could deal with the other issues as they came up.

+1 for the onenote issue. I spent a lot of time looking for alternatives on linux and didn't find anything close either. It's one of the tipping reasons I use Windows.

> LibreOffice is a full-fledged office suite, is feature-complete for just about 99% of things you can do in MS Office

Did you seriously just compare LibreOffice to MS Office? Look I'm a huge Linux fan, but buggy LibreOffice is nowhere near this imaginary "99% feature matched" you've spit out here. The performance is also a joke when it comes to LibreOffice.

As much as the open source camps would like to believe, Microsoft still hast them beat in the Office sector.

I don't think the two are comparable. LibreOffice is still a rather poor (in my view) 1990s office suite. Office 365 is a modern ecosystem that includes a more powerful suite of office programs with much better ease of use, a 50GB mailbox, 1TB of online storage, the great integration of email, OneDrive and online software, the ability to stream Office programs without installing local copies, plus the cross-platform tablet and smartphone apps (ie including Apple and Android).

Buy Office 365 Home and you get all that for five people, which could mean your family or flatmates.

You can't get all that stuff from LibreOffice. As a matter of fact, you can't get it from Google either.

And now the worst Office version is on Windows Phone.

I'm sure Windows 10 will improve that...eventually.

To be fair, the version coming for Windows Mobile 10 will adapt to provide a desktop-like experience when you connect your phone to a monitor or TV. The release cycles are just out of phase.

Yes. Because Microsoft is so likely to nail that user experience well, for a market that is 2% of the mobile market on its best day.

Has anyone given presentations directly from your phone or tablet? I'd love to hear your experience with the process -- setting up, projecting, navigating, presenting.

More generally, I'd like to know if we have gotten to the point where work (maybe not yet for coding and other heavy-duty stuffs) can be done on phones and tablets, so you don't need to lug around your laptops. What are the main hindrances? Screen size?

Somewhat related to screen size, but the biggest problem (at least for my use case) is multitasking.

For instance, sometimes I translate documents, which requires an editor (displaying original / result texts), a dictionary, a browser (for reference, etc.) and maybe other texts and images open at the same time -- and switching between those, let alone seeing them side by side is nearly impossible. (And this is probably specific to Android's limitation, but when I switch back and force between apps, there is no guarantee I will be getting back to where I was -- I might have to open the app again, open the document, which makes it a lot more disruptive than working on PC for most simple translation projects.)

Maybe this will improve, but simple copy and paste across different apps on the phone is frustrating enough that I wouldn't personally do anything beyond simple quick tasks on my phone.

This is just an FYI. The Android issue you pointed out is actually an app issue. In Android, there is a mechanism for saving the state of your app, so that you can get back to the same place when you switch away from and then back to the app. Some apps don't implement that (as a good practice), and it is quite annoying when you run into it. I've seen that issue often, even in apps built by large well-known companies.

I know what you mean regarding copy/paste. Maybe it is due to the touch-based interface, but it is annoying regardless of whether it is on iOS or Android.

I replied to Microsoft's tweet asking if they fixed the credentials issue.

Waiting to hear back. Tweet: https://twitter.com/Microsoft/status/613753678453846016 Original issue: http://bit.ly/1646Fkp

Does this credential issue apply to Word/Excel/Powerpoint? It seems like this is something that the Outlook app is doing.

AFAIK Outlook App, but if you have sharepoint, it might extend into it. Note though that the issue above is for iOS not Android, but I don't have any reason to believe that its any different until told otherwise.

I doubt it, the credential issue is due to the acquisition of Acompli. The Outlook app is actually inherited from their app, and the architecture Acompli used required you to provide the app (and their web service) with your credentials.

The Office apps, I believe, all hook into Azure Active Directory, which means they'll use your Windows Live credentials, ADFS credentials, or otherwise to sign in. If your business uses ADFS, your password won't go to Microsoft.

I can't believe they are still storing my Acompli username after cancelling my account months ago. Accompli is a joke, and was developed in China. I wonder if my user info is still stored there. Sigh.

I guess I will try to get to installing and testing this tonight or tomorrow. I'll post back here with my findings.

I've been using google docs instead of office on PC and android for 6 months now, no regrets.

It's only a matter of time before Google shuts public docs down as well.

What? Google is pushing it's drive and docs heavily to corporate users. I don't see how shutting docs would help those sales.

He is referring to the fact that Google has closed a lot of apps it made in the past. If you start a Google app, make sure you have a path to get off it.

Hmm, are there any that were actually sold as corporate tools . Wave etc. were freemium experiments as far as I can recall...

That's becoming a rather cliched comment unless you have a solid justification for bringing it up. I don't think it really applies in this case.

iirc there was an official MS Office for Android way before this, at least was planned/developed.

Silly Microsoft, it's just called "Android", not "Android Phone".

You may be surprised that a number of apps for Android work only on tablets, while some others have separate versions for phones and tablets.

Sure, but that's not Android's fault. It would be like blaming Microsoft if developers released 'Windows 17" screen' and 'Windows 24" screen' versions of applications instead of just putting both UI layouts in the app and switching. Although I guess on Windows you have the 32bit and 64bit versions of applications available for download half the time...

Android actually makes it easier to do that (define custom UIs for different device settings) than any other platform I know of, so it's definitely the developers fault if you see that.

It's called "android market fragmentation", thus why they are indeed correct saying "Android Phone".

Ok, I don't know maybe it was a big deal in the past, but as an Android user for past 5 years and don't remember this affecting me at all.

I feel like it was some kind of FUD.

They had version running on Android tablets out for months now.

Now they released version for phones.

These are still crippled and written from scratch "mobile" apps, that don't share many of the desktop Office's features, right?

No. They actually share >95% of the desktop code-base: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HROqnw-nf4

I'm not sure which is better

Of all the comments so far on this, this is maybe the coolest. You can really see how Office on OSX has shaped up (if you follow the beta; identical Windows and OSX support on launch day instead of OSX getting it 2 years later like it's been for the past decade), but I'm surprised Android also shares a significant amount of the code base.

It cuts down on bugs, and also makes sure the bugs that are on the desktop are also the same ones on my phone (principal of least surprise at work).

The apps are pretty bloated coming in at over 100MB for each app. Although, it looks like they finally figured out that you don't release a tablet only app for Android, but an app that adapts to the device you're using.

It's still disappointing that they allow dropbox saves and not Google drive, though. But, this is easily remedied by saving the file locally.

Not integrating with Google Drive isn't really the main issue - it's not integrating with the system-wide file dialog that would automatically enable Google Drive support.

If this is the casualty of politics then it's a big thing to throw under the bus.

Incidentally, they do use system-wide file dialog since this version. It is possible to use storage access framework providers now.

Lack of integration with OSX notifications drove me away from outlook.

Just use the damn OS provided features. ugh.

This is because of the impending LibreOffice for Android. https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Android

I highly doubt that. Microsoft has been embracing a lot of things lately. Moving towards Open source and open platforms. I don't believe it has anything to do with LibreOffice but everything to do with change in their attitude.

I'd say that competition prompted that change of attitude. LibreOffice is part of it. We've been raised with Word and Excel, then we discovered that LO and GoogleDocs were enough in the vast majority of cases and Windows was not necessary. Microsoft could be late with going were people moved to. Not too late, but they can count they money they didn't get.

To say that LibreOffice was anything more than a very marginal part of Microsoft's decision to refocus is laughable. The real threat to Microsoft is the movement towards BYOD for corporate customers. If users are bringing their own devices, then Office has to work on whatever devices those users have. Corporate customers aren't switching from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. They're switching from Microsoft Office to Google Apps, or other hosted systems. Bringing (a better) Office experience to Android is Microsoft building a bulwark against Google Docs, not LibreOffice.

If for no other reason, I doubt that because Office for iOS came first, and there's no impending LibreOffice for iOS.

(I doubt it for a lot of other reasons as well.)

No, they suddenly had the epiphany that in order to stay relevant on mobile they had to release their office suite for free on it or suddenly become irrelevant on the biggest mobile platform.

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