Microsoft last week launched Office, a new mobile app for iOS and Android that the company slid into an already packed lineup of individual apps.
Simply dubbed "Office," the new smartphone app — it runs on tablets, but Microsoft promised something skewed more towards them at a later date — steps back into time by combining multiple apps: Word, Excel and PowerPoint. (For those who rile at "OK, boomer," the concept smacks of early low-end suites, like AppleWorks or Microsoft Works.)
Yet Microsoft touted Office not as a return to Work-esque days but as how it sees a future of mobile productivity, with tiny tasks squeezed into any available free moment. If Microsoft's right, Office may be a harbinger of feasible work on a smartphone or even small tablet. Edit a complex Word document on such a device? No thanks. Pick at it here, add to it there? Maybe.
For all that Microsoft hinted at a revolution in the concept of mobile productivity, it gave a bare-bones walk-through of Office. It left a lot of details on the cutting room floor.
Here are some of the things Microsoft didn't tell us about Office or, if it did, under-hyped them. We've fixed that for them.