Microsoft plans to end support for all Windows 10 Mobile applications on Jan. 12, 2021, when , Excel, OneNote PowerPoint and Word applications for the Windows 10 Mobile operating system will no longer get patches from Microsoft, including security fixes. The lack of patch support increases risks for those continuing to use those apps since security holes go unpatched. Additionally, the Windows 10 Mobile OS (version 1709) for Windows Phone devices is nearly dead. It went out of support, on Dec. 10, 2019, and patches will stop arriving.
Microsoft will steer mobile app users to its Office App instead on Windows 10, Android and iOS mobile devices. The Office App combines Excel, PowerPoint and Word into a common experience. It’s also better optimized to handle various mobile tasks, Microsoft contends.
The Office App was available as a preview for Android and iOS mobile device users end of last year , although the iOS preview was limited. Microsoft began including the Office App with Windows 10 OS releases earlier this year. Back then, the Office App was described as a “progressive Web app” that use “service worker” Web technology to work with files offline. The experience users get with the Windows 10 Office App and Office.com, Microsoft’s browser-based Office suite, is pretty much the same.. The Office App has integrated search, access to people cards, and can be customized to use organizational templates, which lets organizations more easily brand created documents, such as PowerPoint presentations.
• The Office App has a special “mobile view” to make reading easier compared with Office Mobile Apps. The Office App is deemed “full fledged,” and will even show comments in a Word document. It has a sticky notes capability.
• The Office Lens solution can be used with mobile device cameras to convert photos of documents into sharable files.
• The Office App is optimized for mobile use via various “actions” that let end users transfer files, scan PDFs or QR codes, and take actions on images.
Office App for Windows 10 and Office.com are already being used by “millions of users and thousands of organizations,” The integrated experience of the Office App on Android and iOS phones, aims to free up storage on mobile devices and means that administrators don’t need to push down as many apps to devices.
Mobile App Redesign
Microsoft recently announced that its Office apps for mobile devices, namely “Outlook, OneDrive, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint,” have all been redesigned and that users can “expect new versions of Teams, Yammer, and Planner soon.” Microsoft is using a Fluent design system for its Office applications that developers can build upon using Microsoft’s Fluent toolkit. The announcement promised the ability of the Fluent mobile design to tap 3-D experiences at some point. These mobile Office application redesigns are taking advantage of the Fluid Framework to improve mobile-use scenarios. The Fluid Framework supports user collaborations via the Microsoft Graph, the SharePoint Framework and Office add-ins.
Why do we need a suite of office apps rather than one? While Word is best suited for text-heavy documents, Word documents can include graphics, too. However, Word isn’t nearly as well-suited to the creation of graphics-heavy documents as Publisher is. Similarly, you can paste tables and charts from Excel into Word, Publisher, PowerPoint and other Office applications, just as you can also add raw text or graphics to an Excel spreadsheet. My point is that with a few exceptions, each of the Office applications can accommodate text, graphics, tables and other types of media. However, each of the Office applications is geared heavily toward one specific type of data. Excel, for example, would not be the best application to use if you were writing a novel, even though you could theoretically compose a long manuscript inside a spreadsheet. Likewise, PowerPoint isn’t the best choice when you need an accounting tool.
The fluid design framework is a step forward to closer integration.
