Is mobile office good enough?

<p>It's an interesting question, and one that I've struggled with for years. In principle, yes. In practical terms, not really, no. For better or worse, there's always going to be that one must-have feature that doesn't exist or work the same way on the mobile version, and that's going to be a deal breaker for a significant percentage of the user base.</p><p>That said, I think Microsoft is doing a good(ish) job in transitioning Office to a web/mobile-first experience. On those occasions when I've needed to open/edit a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file on my iPhone, it works well enough…once you figure out how the miniaturized version of the ribbon works, that is. As a technical writer, I wouldn't want to work on it every day…not for a million dollars.</p><p>I think it speaks to how many of us have contorted our Office (and really all PC technology) experience. We're creatures of habit. We get used to setting up our documents in specific ways, and then it becomes immediately apparent when that feature set is different or lacking, even if there's a perfectly equivalent way to do the same task on a different platform.</p><p>I was really encouraged by the direction I saw Microsoft heading with Office in the past couple of years. They had announced that OneNote was going all UWP, and I assumed that would happen with the other apps in due time. Currently, there's a bit of a feature gap between OneNote 2016 (the apparent "last" desktop version of OneNote) and its modern UWP counterpart, but I've become less reliant on the former version.</p><p>Unfortunately, the same hasn't happened with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Those UWP apps are fine, but aside from new icons, they haven't really worked to close the feature gap in the past year, and now it doesn't seem the classic Win32 versions are going away anytime soon. So all we have is a disjointed mess where some Office products are Win32, while others are UWP/modern/store, and there are basically two versions of virtually every Office app that can be installed side-by-side on the same PC.</p><p>Outlook is kind of its own mess. The Win10 Mail/Calendar/People apps are pretty decent (I actually prefer to work in them instead of desktop Outlook), but they don't feel like Outlook, either from a UI or a branding perspective. There's minimal integrated functionality with Skype for Business for scheduling online meetings, but not much else. They're not even branded as Outlook. <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">It feels more like using your mobile device's native platform mail/calendar clients to connect to your email.</span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">In general, I think this is where Microsoft has and will continue to struggle against competitors like Google's G-suite. Those platforms don't have the legacy desktop apps and feature set to match. And so even if they're not as functional as their Office counterparts, they do have the advantage of looking and feeling like they were designed with a unified purpose, and they take full advantage of the mobile/web platforms on which they run.</span></p>