With Windows 10 beginning to roll-out to consumers, Microsoft has released in tandem its tablet-focused productivity suite available from the Windows Store.
The Office Mobile apps, consisting of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote and available as universal apps, present Windows 10 users with a slew of features they're accustomed to see on the traditional desktop version of the software – but only with an Office 365 subscription. To create and edit documents in this edition of Office, you can expect to pay upwards of $7 a month. Otherwise, the apps are restricted to viewing-only.
While this edition of Office is optimized for tablet displays 8-inches or greater, Office 2016 for desktops is slated for release later this fall. Additionally, Office Mobile is expected to be updated later in the fall with improved support for phones and Windows 10 Mobile. Microsoft considers Office Mobile for tablets "Great for reading, reviewing, and editing" while Office Mobile for phones is better for "viewing, triage and quick editing".
To have been developed with mobile devices in mind, these apps certainly aren't the most storage-conscious. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are said to occupy about 100MB each. OneNote, on the other hand, is built into the new operating system and takes up 92MB of space.
As corporate VP Kirk Koenigbauer explains, all four of these Office Mobile apps "are built from the ground up for touch." Complete with "full fidelity viewing" of Office documents, Office Mobile integrates with Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage service in order to save and open files across a wide range of devices. Along with a host of new intelligence features, Microsoft believes these new apps will, in turn, increase productivity on the go.