Microsoft has been running a preview of Office applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint on Android tablets for a while now. All along, Android smartphone users have been using the Office Mobile application for tasks like document editing. Now the touch-optimized Office preview is coming to smartphones as well.
Office preview is available as a beta and those interested in trying it out before it eventually rolls out to everyone later will have to do the obvious: join the Office preview Google+ community, follow the right links to each Office application and register as a beta tester then click the download link. Note that it may take a while before they appear on the Play Store for you to download (Microsoft talks of up to 4 hours). In my case it took just a few minutes.
I have been testing the three Office apps and they are excellent. Actually they are very stable for a beta release and we expect Microsoft to finish the testing phase soon. Being betas they may be a few bugs here and there but they are good for everyday use. Dropbox, OneDrive integration is all fine. I was able to edit a spreadsheet on OneDrive as well as a document on Dropbox.
In essence, Microsoft has unbundled Office so now you don’t have one application for everything. Instead you have an application for each of the office tasks like word processing, presentations and spreadsheets. Google did the same thing last year when it unbundle apps from Google Drive so today we have Sheets, Slides and Docs as separate apps.
