Microsoft today discussed its transformation in becoming the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world.
Speaking on the occasion, Alok Lall, Director – Microsoft Office Division (MOD), Microsoft India said, “Consumers today want to be connected, wherever they are, whatever they are doing. A recent study has shown that affluent, urban consumers spend 6.5 hours per day on a computing device, of which they stay connected 50% of the time via their smartphones and the remaining 50%* through a combination of their laptops, desktops and tablets. This trend has naturally resulted in users looking for a seamless technology experience across devices. Our goal is to reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization do more and achieve more.”
While urgent emailing on the move has emerged as the most important issue faced by most respondents, consumers also want to read, edit and create documents on the go. 83%* of consumers attend to urgent mails while on the move and multiple device access is critical to 36%*.
Since announcing availability, Microsoft Office for iPad and Office for iPhone apps have been downloaded more than 80 million times. More than 1.2 billion people worldwide use Office. **
Microsoft today provides multiple ways to allow consumers to be more productive than before, regardless of where they are:
- Office on Android tablets—Consumers can use Word, Excel and PowerPoint in addition to Skype, OneNote and OneDrive on their Android tablets—all optimized to give them the best mobile Office experience. Word documents can be reviewed by tracking changes and adding comments, and work can be shared. Excel spreadsheets support formulas, charts, tables, PivotTables, sorting, filtering and comments. PowerPoint comes with rich formatting and embedded video, transitions and animations.
- Outlook for iOS and Android—The new Outlook app for iOS and Android phones and tablets brings together the core tools to get things done—email, calendar, contacts and files—even on the smallest screen. Consumers can one-touch their way through their inbox, find what they need fast, and easily schedule meetings and work with attachments.
- Save Outlook.com email attachments to OneDrive—Using just one click, one can now save an individual email attachment or group of attachments to OneDrive cloud storage. This means that attachments no longer clutter the mailbox and one can easily access and share them from devices at any time.
- Access to password-protected sections in the OneNote for Windows Store app—If you are working on your favorite device and need to unlock a password-protected section of a OneNote notebook, you can now go to the section, type in your password and you can view and edit that section just like any other. To protect privacy, the section automatically locks if OneNote isn’t used for a few minutes.
- OneNote for iPhone update—With the new OneNote Today widget, consumers can capture thoughts fast, right from the Notification Center, without opening the app. Plus, the updated Recent Notes list includes the notes most recently edited on any device, so users can start on a desktop or tablet and pick up right where they left off in OneNote on the iPhone.
- New OneNote training website for teachers, lesson plans, more—OneNote for teachers.com was developed to train educators—in about an hour—on how to use OneNote in ways that are immediately relevant to their daily school lives. The training is interactive and free. Once the teacher is trained, she can add Bing in the Classroom lesson plans that are delivered in OneNote and learn how to use OneNote Class Notebook Creator, now available in many more languages.
- Office Mix now works with the Moodle open source LMS—Moodle, one of the most popular learning management systems, is now integrated with OneNote, OneDrive for Business, the Office 365 Outlook Calendar and Office Mix. With Office Mix, teachers can easily embed interactive online lessons created in PowerPoint. These lessons can include audio, video, digital ink, interactive simulations or assessments.
- New accessibility enhancements for Office Online—Office Online was designed to be usable with a screen reader, but over the past year it has been improved to make it even more accessible. With the new Narrator, the user can hear formatting information read out loud while using the arrow keys to navigate in a document. Also, in Word Online and OneNote Online users can have text read out loud, without having to move the cursor.
- Sway for iPhone available more broadly—The new Sway for iPhone app helps easily pull together, format and share content in a way that’s expressive, so consumers can quickly create polished, interactive content from mobile devices. Sway was initially released in New Zealand and Australia, but now customers in the U. S., Canada, the United Kingdom, India and a number of other countries can also download Sway for iPhone.
- Sway updates—New features added to Sway on the web include the ability to add content from third-party sites via embed codes and the ability to import content from documents in more file formats and to import documents more simply.
Consumers can keep themselves updated on the latest news on Office by visiting blogs.office.com
