Hands On With Office For iPhone

Microsoft Office has finally made its way to iOS.

Free to download, the app only works for those who has subscribed to Microsoft Office 365 (at a cost of about $10 a month of $100 a year), and for now there's only an iPhone version — iPad users still only get Office web apps via the browser.

Using Office for iPhone you can edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents right on your phone's screen, andyou can also create new Word and Excel documents on the fly. Everything you create or edit is synced via Office 365's cloud capabilities to other devices, regardless of platform.

All that sounds great, but what does it look like in action? Check out our hands-on with the new app in the video above.

Will you be using Microsoft Office on your iPhone? When do you see the app coming in handy? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

1. Opening Screen

   Here's the screen that greets you in Office Mobile for iPhone, available today in the Apple App Store. It's a free download, but you'll need to have an Office 365 subscription to use it.

   

2. Sign-in Screen

   You can sign in with an Office ID, which is usually your Microsoft account. Every Office user can add five iOS devices to their account, so a whole family can potentially use Office on their iPhones (or iPod Touches).

   

3. Documents and Navigation

   This is the Recent screen, which lets you browse recently edited or viewed documents as well as samples.

   

4. SkyDrive Integrated

   All documents are saved and synced to SkyDrive. If you use SharePoint, documents on that service are accessible, too.

   

5. Word

   The functions in Word are very minimal. Users can view documents and perform basic edits (including commenting), but adding bulleted lists or changing the font isn't possible.

   

6. Formatting Options

   Here are the formatting options available in Word for iPhone.

   

7. Locked Document

   Even though this document is the right format (docx), it can't be edited in Word for iPhone.

   

8. Excel

   Excel for iPhone includes many editing options, including generating tables and formatting cells.

   

9. Editing Tools

   Here are some of the editing tools you get in Excel.

   

10. PowerPoint

    PowerPoint for iPhone is mainly a viewer, but you can still add notes and edit the text in slides.

    

11. Editing Slides

    Here are the few editing tools in PowerPoint.

    

12. Multiple Slide View

    You can view slide thumbnails with a tap.