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I hope this comes as a 64-bit update to the old Office Mobile app on my iPhone and iPad, which, you may remember, already bundled the 3 core apps together before they split them into separate apps in 2015.
 
Google would rather create hype about a new app that unifies their Google Docs stuff, and then either release it with minimal updates or just can the project all together. 😂

google has too much talent, but no one with common sense intelligence. just a big house of over-nerded people who often fail delivering someting meaningfull.
 
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I agree with your observations except for idea that MS came late to the game. They were leading the game before there was even a game. I did quite a bit of development on MS' mobile platforms during the late 90's and into the mid 00's.

Their flaw was that they lacked the determination to stick with it through tough times. As soon as the going got a little rocky, they pulled back and then tried to re-boot the platform. They tried re-re-rebooting 3 or 4 times and with each attempt to reboot, they lost the confidence of more developers. Why spend the time and money to develop something when MS is simply going to sunset it and start something new (that isn't quite compatible with what was old)?

Agree completely. In my post I did not want to go through all iterations and reboots 😉. So I meant the last reboot (Windows mobile) was 'too late to the game',
 
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This "brand new" idea is pretty cool. All of your main functions of the three apps in one streamlined app. This used to be called "Microsoft Works." They killed it in 2009... but I'd welcome it back with its new name.
 
Office mobile was a single app for years until they broke it apart when they introduced it to iOS and Android. Now they are recombining it. It only makes sense to split it apart so that teams can focus on getting each component working reliably and then to recombine it to once again benefit from shared components and achieve a tighter integration between apps.
 
I used it a couple of days ago. Opened up a Word document, closed it, opened up a PowerPoint (on my frigging iPhone! Who looks at or tries to work on PowerPoint on an iPhone?) - and both docs opened beautifully. It's a great idea - just can't wait for them to bring it to larger devices. Like my iPad Pro or iMac.
 
I used it a couple of days ago. Opened up a Word document, closed it, opened up a PowerPoint (on my frigging iPhone! Who looks at or tries to work on PowerPoint on an iPhone?) - and both docs opened beautifully. It's a great idea - just can't wait for them to bring it to larger devices. Like my iPad Pro or iMac.

I do use Numbers (not Excel) and Google Sheets on my phone. They're actually usable, maybe Excel is too but I just haven't had the need. Powerpoint, Keynote or Google Slides not so much as a creation tool but for last minute text editing and as the source for giving a presentation that does work well.
 
Am I missing something? Perfectly correct English as far as I can tell.

FYI looking at FSCshan’s quote above and the distinction below ...



“Americans and Canadians don’t use programme at all, preferring program for all senses of the word.”

Microsoft is an American company and not the press so yes its a spelling mistake; especially for us in Canada whom speak and write en francais and use programme. Your article fails to reflect on specifics for Canada or in France which is surprising.
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MS is making some pretty nice iOS apps lately. The Outlook app is only adding features every few weeks and making the buggy broke iOS Mail app look like a toy now that isnt fixed months later still somehow.

This does look nice and is working well already for a beta.

iOS Outlook app, like ios Mail, still doesn’t allow rules to be created or adjusted. Further Outlook on iOS doesn’t allow you to set out of Office when you’re on O365 account - which bth kind boggling and absolutely hilarious as an oversight.

Agree. Excel on iPhone is cute and surprisingly useful for a pocket size app, bit less useful on iPad, and the Mac version remains ridiculously far behind Windows. It just sucks. Pivot table/chart support is still very basic, data query / model management is crappy, PowerBI is... nowhere to be seen. And RAM and processor management are still ridiculous. An i3 Windows laptop remains quicker than an iMac pro at manipulating large or complex Excel spreadsheets.
My work offers a choice between a Macbook Pro and a HP Elitebook and although I wish I had a Macbook, I can't fathom having to deal with Excel for Mac, and use the Elitebook instead (they are also cheap and unbreakable, which is nice).

You’re very lucky to work in such a great environment! Why not opt for the MBP and then install a licensed VM of Win10 Ent setup your work account therein and use that for MS Excel?!

you are indeed right about excel add-in limitations, pivot tables and also for no PowerBI. What’s worse is the lack of add-ins for Outlook on Mac (Cisco Mail VM, WebEx Meetings plug-in, etc).
 
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iOS Outlook app, like ios Mail, still doesn’t allow rules to be created or adjusted. Further Outlook on iOS doesn’t allow you to set out of Office when you’re on O365 account - which bth kind boggling and absolutely hilarious as an oversight.

Name one iOS Mail app that does that very specific item like on-device rules; I'll wait.

The iOS Outlook app does auto reply just fine on an Outlook.com account in the settings for that account above block external images and save contacts. Looking right at it right now. Its only on or off, not by time, but better than nothing. Dont have 365 to know why, maybe reach out to them and ask or its a bug/coming soon. I dont see why outlook/com accounts woud but not 365

Mobile mail is not a desktop replacement but rather a companion. Further, mail in the iOS Outlook app (or any 3rd party app) is handled server-side and pushed to the app, not on-device; unlike say desktop outlook or Apple Mail where native rules can process in the application if it's open all the time. Im sure it's possible to do but most people are changing rules every 5 seconds to need mobile access to them in the app versus the via the account itself on the web.
 
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Name one iOS Mail app that does that very specific item like on-device rules; I'll wait.

The iOS Outlook app does auto reply just fine on an Outlook.com account in the settings for that account above block external images and save contacts. Looking right at it right now. Its only on or off, not by time, but better than nothing. Dont have 365 to know why, maybe reach out to them and ask or its a bug/coming soon. I dont see why outlook/com accounts woud but not 365

Mobile mail is not a desktop replacement but rather a companion. Further, mail in the iOS Outlook app (or any 3rd party app) is handled server-side and pushed to the app, not on-device; unlike say desktop outlook or Apple Mail where native rules can process in the application if it's open all the time. Im sure it's possible to do but most people are changing rules every 5 seconds to need mobile access to them in the app versus the via the account itself on the web.

Outlook, supposedly, back in 2017 according to this post did <see the answer post>

It's potentially due to the hybrid nature of E1 or E5 accounts, maybe? I'll keep digging and asking my Lv3 contact within infrastructure as it's very frustrating.

Outlook 365 does use push and rules are server side now (since 2016 suite I believe). I've tested this by re-imaging my computer, different host name and also switching to an entirely new model laptop with new image first time sign on ... all my rules were there and active on both setups, just like my original. Regarding iOS would be nice as I'm sure ActiveSync supports this.

this unification of office apps used to be seen with older clients such as Documents2Go and was VERY poor at it. Back then (S60, Microsoft PocketPC Edition, and BlackBerry OS) it was pretty much the ONLY game in town and having a desktop sync client really limited what users needed to do.
 
“Americans and Canadians don’t use programme at all, preferring program for all senses of the word.”

Microsoft is an American company and not the press so yes its a spelling mistake; especially for us in Canada whom speak and write en francais and use programme. Your article fails to reflect on specifics for Canada or in France which is surprising.
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I am probably going completely off topic, but here goes:

I live in the Netherlands and Microsoft responds to me in the Dutch language in spite of being an American company. (I yet have to find a spelling error in their Dutch 😉). The example with the 'spelling mistake' just as well could have been an MS response to someone in the UK, who knows? I could not determine that from the provided screenshot. So, in my opinion, it is open for debate if it is a spelling mistake or not😉.

As far as the article goes.. I just provided the link, so I don't have a clue why this article fails to reflect on specifics for Canada or France. Your guess is as good as mine.
 
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Does this do anything to unify the features of each "mode"? Or does opening a Word document essentially open Word in the app? For example can tables in Word documents in this app access Excel functionality? (I know you can do this on Desktop work by embedding an Excel document via OLE but that's different)
This is the thing that has been missing from productivity suites - true integration of document with each of the applications rather than embedding document types. For example, being able to easily include a calculated result In Word or Powerpoint based on an Excel spreadsheet. or text from word integrated into Excel graphs to produce a report. I do that that now but it is not easy and dometimes it simply fails to work.
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I wish Microsoft had continued a Windows mobile OS. As far as I’m aware it failed because the hardware sucked? Apple needs competition and Google/Android isn’t competition for me.
Having used it on several iterations of HP devices as well as phones I can say it was a total disaster, IMHO. They tried to put Windows on a small screen rather than optimize the OS to the screen. Great promise, poor execution.
 
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newer apps like Sway and PowerBI have been great.
PowerBI is nice but still a bag of hurt in terms of features. Can’t apply formatting rules universally to table, no ability to link graph widgets to a new page so yoi can click to fig into details, no Mac native client so you have to use the web version which is a subset of the desktop in terms of features...
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This "brand new" idea is pretty cool. All of your main functions of the three apps in one streamlined app. This used to be called "Microsoft Works." They killed it in 2009... but I'd welcome it back with its new name.
Apple had it on the ][ called Appleworks...
 
For example, being able to easily include a calculated result In Word or Powerpoint based on an Excel spreadsheet. or text from word integrated into Excel graphs to produce a report. I do that that now but it is not easy and dometimes it simply fails to work.

Yeah, tech like OLE and OpenDoc were supposed to solve this problem, but it's not an easy problem to actually go solve, and why they've had limited impact (OLE) or been abandoned (OpenDoc). But they were trying to solve it for the general case by making it so applications were also plugins for other applications.

At the end of the day, it's surprisingly hard to separate data from the logic that understands what the data actually means and what to actually do with it. Web services do a better job by hiding that logic behind the REST API, lowering the effort required to integrate with a source of data, but requiring that the data be stored on someone's servers.
 
At the end of the day, it's surprisingly hard to separate data from the logic that understands what the data actually means and what to actually do with it. Web services do a better job by hiding that logic behind the REST API, lowering the effort required to integrate with a source of data, but requiring that the data be stored on someone's servers.

Yea. it probably would take starting with a clean sheet of paper to design a data system from the ground up that is capable of supporting such integration; and then writing a new integrated program to use it rather than trying to use existing ones.

The problem with such an approach is overcoming Office's huge user base; which would probably mean the program would have to have the look and feel of the existing programs which defeats the whole purpose of an integrated approach.
 
A few years ago, Microsoft had one of those all-in-one app in the form of Office Mobile back in iOS 7 days, and I actually downloaded and used it briefly. It was also 32-bit. Now Microsoft wants to build a all-in-one app again 5 years later?
Here are some screenshots.
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81E9BDF2-430D-4522-A91B-379B04DAFB06.png

60BD242E-11FF-428E-81F5-4F2D9FA626A3.png


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iOS already supports split screen within apps.
iPadOS 13 offers exactly that.
I think what he means is iOS allow one app to create its own window of some sort and multitask like that, a bit like having its own sub windows, though I‘d argue current iOS implementation does similar features for the most people already.
Here is a quick sketch showing the idea.
C9DA9C7B-EBD4-4EBE-8CBF-C80FFCEF95F0.png
 
I think what he means is iOS allow one app to create its own window of some sort and multitask like that, a bit like having its own sub windows, though I‘d argue current iOS implementation does similar features for the most people already.
Here is a quick sketch showing the idea.
View attachment 876538

Do you mean overlapping windows?
 
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