Is Microsoft 365 free on mobile?

As of this week, all Android users can install Microsoft's new free, lightweight version of key Office apps from the Google Play Store. 

Dubbed Microsoft Office, the Microsoft Android bundle includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in a single smartphone app, as opposed to the previously available separate Office Android apps. 

The package contains lightweight versions of Office apps that let users view documents and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. It also allows users to collaborate on Office documents in real time, use templates, as well as access and search for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files stored in a personal cloud storage account, on the device, or across an organization for users with a work account.

Microsoft has been testing the new unified Office mobile app since announcing it in November at its Ignite conference. The app is likely to come preinstalled on Microsoft's forthcoming Surface Duo dual-screen phones.

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The app also lets users create PDFs from photos and Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, transfer files from a phone a computer, sign PDFs with a finger, take notes with Sticky Notes and scan QR codes. 

Users who want to upgrade to the full version of the apps can do so by making an in-app purchase. 

As noted by Android Police, at the moment the unified Office app does not support tablets or Android-compatible Chromebooks, unlike the existing dedicated Office apps, which do.

At present, the unified Office app has over 50 million installs from the Google Play Store, compared with over one billion for the standalone Microsoft Word app. 

Microsoft first released the unified Office app on the new Samsung Galaxy Note 10 and is using the bundle as a way to encourage more people to use Office before potentially upgrading to the full-feature, paid-for versions.

Microsoft released its Office Mobile suite (Word Mobile, Excel Mobile, PowerPoint Mobile, and OneNote) on July 29 along with the much anticipated Windows 10. These apps are intended to provide a touch-friendlier functional bridge between the browser-based Microsoft Offline Online web apps and the full featured Office 365 components. However, all is not what it seems here.

The Office Mobile apps are supposed provide “core editing” functions for free on Windows 10 tablets with displays that are 10.1 inches or smaller. However, in testing, this is not what I experienced. These mobile Office apps gave me basic editing features on a Dell tablet with an 8-inch display as promised, which is fine. However, when I tried to use the same apps to edit a Word document on a Asus tablet with a 10.1 inch display, I was greeted with the pop-up window you see here below, advising me that I need an Office 365 subscription to edit the file.

That was confusing, so I initiated an Office web support chat to learn what is going on. I asked about editing using the free version of Word Mobile for Windows 10 on a tablet with a display of 10.1 inches or smaller. The apparently ill-informed support person told me that there is no free version of Word Mobile that supports editing documents. This is, of course, contradicted by Microsoft’s own and my experience with Office Mobile apps on a tablet with an 8-inch display.

Ignoring this support issue for the moment, how are the Office Mobile apps on a Windows 10 tablet? They are relatively finger friendly on an 8-inch Windows 10 tablet. However, you might have noticed that the icons and buttons on the right side Word Mobile’s ribbon area (screenshot above) are relatively small for an interface that is supposed to be touched with a fingertip. Overall, I’d say the apps are not as finger-friendly as any number of productivity apps for an iPad or Android tablet.

The apps also seemed to have extremely limited access to my Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage account. In fact, I could not find a way to navigate to any OneDrive folder. And, the apps frequently reported that it could not read the files it listed from OneDrive.

If you want to use features beyond basic editing, it turns out you might need to pay for an Office 365 subscription. For example, you’ll need a subscription if you want the ability to track and review changes, change page orientation, insert section and page breaks, or enable text columns in Word. Customizing Excel pivot table layouts and viewing PowerPoint speaker notes while presenting are also tied to an Office 365 subscription.

In my experience, even the relatively low-powered and low-priced tablets for Windows 8 work reasonably well with the regular desktop versions of Microsoft Office. Since the Office Mobile apps are merely good, but not great, for use with touch screens, I’m not sure there’s much incentive to use these minimally featured Office apps.

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