Microsoft Office on Your Android Phone – for Free

Android phandroids, your long wait is finally over. Microsoft’s mainstay productivity suite is finally available on Google-flavored phones

Tacitly acknowledging that nobody is going to switch to Windows Phone just so they can edit Powerpoints with their thumbs, Microsoft today officially made Office available for Android phones, free of charge. (It has been available for Android tablets since February.) A preview version has been available in the Play store since mid May.

Now you can take your weighty Word docs, impressive Excel spreadsheets, and scintillating Powerpoint presentations with you, edit them on your Android phone, and then share all that Microsofty goodness with your colleagues. When you open the files on your computer, all your changes will be there, formatted correctly.

For that to work, of course, you’ll need to store your docs in the cloud. Office for Android phone can connect to most of the major cloud storage services, including Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, and Microsoft’s Sharepoint or OneDrive (obviously), but not iCloud.

Microsoft is making this version of Office free for personal use. If you want to use it commercially, you’ll need a paid subscription to Office 365 (at $10  a month or $100 per year). The premium version will also give you a handful of extra features inside Android Office, such as the ability to track edit changes inside Word or to annotate slides using  Powerpoint Ink and then save them.

Office for Android Phones will work with Android handsets running KitKat (Android 4.4) and Lollipop (5.x); Microsoft says it will also support Google’s upcoming version of Android, known today only as “M”, when it becomes available. Office will come preloaded on Android phones from major handset makers such as Samsung, LG, and Sony later this year.