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Microsoft adds new features to Office and OneDrive apps for iPad, iPhone

Steven Winkelman
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iPad keyboard
While the iPad is quickly becoming a computer replacement in many workplaces, it’s far from perfect. A lot of third-party apps have been slow to incorporate new features that bolster the iPad’s productivity features. Microsoft, however, is going against the grain by adding several new features to its Office and OneDrive apps for the iPad and iPhone that makes using the productivity powerhouse much easier.

Drag and drop

Perhaps the most useful new feature for both Office and OneDrive is the integration of drag and drop functionality. Apple introduced drag and drop to the iPad with the release of iOS 11 in 2017. With drag and drop, it’s easy to move images and files to different files on the iPad and iPhone.

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With the latest update of Microsoft Office, it’s simple to move content to different apps. For example, if you’re working on a presentation, you can drag a graph from Excel directly to PowerPoint instead of having to import the data.

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You can also drag and drop files in OneDrive. This is a much welcome addition that allows you to easily organize your documents in the OneDrive app. The update also allows you to quickly share files by dragging them to other applications like Mail or iMessage.

Co-authoring

Although co-authoring has been available on Office Online as well as the Mac and PC versions of Office for some time, it’s finally making its way to iOS apps. This feature allows you to share and collaborate on documents in real time. The co-authoring function also allows you to see who is in a document and track any changes so you won’t have to worry about losing past contributions.

OneDrive improvements

Microsoft gave OneDrive a major overhaul in its latest iOS update. The new OneDrive app is more user-friendly so it’s much easier to find documents. If you use list view, you can also see metadata so it’s simple to who you’ve shared a document with and when it was last updated.

Microsoft also gave the preview function in OneDrive a major boost. With the newest version of OneDrive, you can instantly preview more than 130 different types of files. You can now preview the majority of common file types without ever leaving the app. It also allows you to view files without having to download dozens of different apps that can quickly eat up storage space.

Other features

Improved accessibility features played a pretty big role in the latest iOS update. Users now have greater control over the way large text is displayed in Office apps. Office also features greatly improved voice-over features in the update, thanks to the VoiceOver rotor in iOS.

To use the new features, you need to update the Office and OneDrive apps in the App Store. If you don’t see updates available, check again in a few days as Microsoft plans to roll out this week.

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