With its Office 2010 family of products, Microsoft has advanced its best-selling office productivity solutions
beyond the PC desktop with web-based Office Web Apps as well as a new
generation of its Office Mobile, which runs on Windows Phone.
Originally dubbed Pocket Office (as in, “Is that an
Office in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”), Microsoft’s mobile
version of Office debuted a decade ago as part of the Pocket PC platform.
Originally, it consisted of Pocket Outlook, Pocket Word, and Pocket Excel, and
over the years PowerPoint and OneNote applications were added as well.
Eventually, the Pocket moniker was dropped in lieu of the more professional sounding
name Office Mobile.
As you might imagine, given the constrained environs of
a typical Windows Phone screen, Office Mobile doesn’t provide much competition
for the PC-based versions of Office, or even the Office Web Apps for that
matter. But it wasn’t designed for that purpose. Instead, Microsoft sees Office
Mobile as a companion for the Office user on the go, and it’s best, I think, to
understand this fact and what that means when it comes time to actually use
Office Mobile on Windows Phone.
What You Can Do
Office Mobile is a great way to view Office documents—and
from now on, unless I specify Word documents explicitly, I’m referring to Excel
spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and OneNote notes here as well—even
rich Office documents, on the go. If all you’re looking for is a document
reader, Office Mobile is a fantastic solution, and it’s compatible with even
the very latest document formats used by the PC applications in Office 2010.
Office Mobile is also a decent solution for editing Office documents, even rich
Office documents, on the go. One of the issues with this functionality is that
Office Mobile cannot accurately display some of the more complex document
layouts supported by modern Office application versions. But as you’ll see in a
bit, you can generally work around these issues, and it does a great job of
retaining underlying formatting even when these elements aren’t accurately
rendered onscreen. If what you need to do is read a document and make light
edits, Office Mobile works quite well. Office Mobile is a great solution for
synchronizing Office documents between your phone and your work-based
SharePoint document repositories. It also respects and understands
enterprise-oriented Information Rights Management (IRM) technology, which is
used to secure documents, electronically, from prying eyes. If you are a
OneNote user—and it’s very clear that Microsoft intends to make you one—or just
someone who likes to take notes frequently, OneNote Mobile for Windows Phone is
a first-class note-taking solution.
What You Can’t
Do
So that’s what Office Mobile can do for you. What about
its limitations? Office Mobile is somewhat lacking for those that wish to
access SkyDrive-based Office documents and completely lacking if you want to
sync them between the Web and your phone. If you want to create new Word or
Excel documents, Office Mobile is a decent solution that lacks only the more
complex formatting options that are available on the Web and on the PC.
However, if you save these documents externally to the phone, you can later
edit them again in Windows or on the Web and add complex new formatting easily
enough. If you want to create new PowerPoint presentations on the go, you’re
out of luck: You cannot create a new presentation with PowerPoint Mobile. (That
said, you could of course create basic, empty presentations and save them to
the device as templates for future presentations. It does support Save As.)
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