Microsoft Office apps now available openly on Android

A few weeks ago, Microsoft starting giving closed invitations to people for its beta versions of MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps for Android. But starting today, Microsoft has started offering all three of these apps without any invitation.

Currently, all the apps are the preview versions of their respective applications. According to Microsoft, these apps are specifically designed for Android tablets. In a blog post published on official Office website, Microsoft stated the requirement for using these apps. Any tablet between 7 to 10 inches category running Android KitKat or Lollipop and featuring an ARM based processor can run these apps.

This whole effort that Microsoft is putting into these apps is to make sure those Office apps reach as many users as possible; iOS and Android included. Previously, Microsoft only concentrated on the Windows and Windows Phone versions of MS Office.

Just like the previous versions, users can perform basic tasks like editing or viewing a document but for any other feature; they have to subscribe to Office 365 subscription in order to do more with their documents.

In the blog post mentioned above, Microsoft Office 365 team said, “we want more feedback from more users to ensure that Office apps work well on a range of different Android tablets before launching the official apps.”

The apps are still in beta stages and Microsoft hasn’t said anything about when it will release the full versions of these apps and whether they will follow the same subscription model or will be priced separately only once. But whatever the case is, it is expected that the complete version of Office for Android users will be available before summer this year.