Office for iPhone is Updated with Contextual Commands

Office for iPhone is Updated with Contextual Commands

Microsoft’s core Office apps on iPhone—Word, Excel and PowerPoint—were updated today with special contextual toolbars of commands that are specifically designed for the phone form factor.

Microsoft hasn’t blogged about the changes yet, so we have to go by the app store descriptions of the updates.

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

“Edit with speed!,” the update description for Word and PowerPoint Mobile reads. “Have quick access to commands that make sense in the moment.” The Excel update uses a slightly different description: In that app, you can “have quick access to commands when you work with shapes and graphics.”

The update descriptions each note that the changes are “iPhone only,” meaning they are not appearing in the iPad versions of the apps.

So. What does this mean in the real world? After all, these apps have sported pop-up context menus for a while now. Like this one.

contextual

Since the Excel description is, well, more descriptive, I tested inserting shapes and graphics. And in addition to that pop-up menu, you also get a toolbar of commands at the bottom. Those commands only appear when you select one of those objects. And they are of course context-sensitive to the objects.

pop-up

And if there are too many commands to view at once, you can slide on the toolbar to scroll over to view the rest.

more-commands

On Android, you just get a single pop-up that maps to the top pop-up seen in the iPhone shots. I’ll need to look around in Word and PowerPoint Mobile to see what changed there.

And on a related note, Microsoft Outlook for iOS was also updated today to support the Albanian language and the .eml attachment format.

 

Tagged with

Share post

Please check our Community Guidelines before commenting

Conversation

There are no conversations

Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox

Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Thurrott © 2024 Thurrott LLC