The best office apps for Android

The days of taking good care of enterprise completely in an office are over. You’ve obtained a robust productiveness gadget in your pocket virtually 24/7, in any case — and with the best set of apps, you possibly can keep synced with the identical spreadsheets, paperwork, and displays which are in your desktop and work with them seamlessly from wherever.

Best of all? Achieving that degree of connectivity on Android not requires a compromise. It’s been a very long time coming, however the bar has actually been raised with regards to office app high quality within the Google Play Store over the previous few years. The query now is not if you’ll find a worthwhile set of office apps for your telephone however somewhat which set of commendable choices makes essentially the most sense for you.

I’ve frolicked testing all of the related contenders, starting from the small-name efforts that used to dominate my suggestions to the big-name merchandise from the extra well-known productiveness gamers. Focusing on components equivalent to function availability, ease of use, ecosystem integration, and general consumer expertise, these are the best office apps on Android in the present day.

Looking for e-mail apps? See my roundup of the best e-mail and texting apps for Android.

The best totally featured Android office apps

Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

Microsoft was embarrassingly late to the Android app occasion, however for the reason that firm began taking the world’s hottest working system critically, its Android productiveness companies have been among the many best round.

That stays true in the present day with its core Office choices: Word, for phrase processing; Excel, for spreadsheet modifying; and PowerPoint, for presentation work. If you are used to utilizing the equal Microsoft 365/Office 365 merchandise on the desktop — or in the event you simply want totally featured cellular office apps with all of the bells and whistles — Microsoft’s trio of Android apps goes to be your best all-around possibility for on-the-go productiveness. And in the event you’re planning to make use of all three, now you can even obtain them in a space-saving and easier-to-manage all-in-one Android Office bundle.

Perhaps the best power of Microsoft’s Android apps is their easy cross-platform compatibility and consistency: First, as you’d count on, all three apps deal with customary Office file codecs flawlessly and with pristine formatting constancy. And past that, in the event you’re already utilizing Word, Excel, or PowerPoint in another setting, you will have primarily no studying curve with the matching Android variations; the apps’ interfaces and interplay kinds can be instantly acquainted and straightforward to grasp.

Word, for occasion, begins off with a small, scrollable toolbar — a sized-down model of the Office Ribbon. It’s a sensible strategy to preserve house and will let you have a big working space (particularly when a digital keyboard is current and taking on a good portion of your display).

Tapping an arrow on the toolbar’s proper facet, in the meantime, expands the toolbar into a bigger type with menu sections comparable to many of the Ribbon tabs you see in Word’s desktop or net app: Home, with frequent instructions for fundamental textual content formatting; Insert, with the usual full vary of choices; Layout, with instructions for adjusting your doc’s margins, orientation, column configuration, and so forth; Review, for checking spelling or phrase rely, managing feedback, and activating Track Changes mode; and View, for transferring between totally different layouts and zoom settings.

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The Word app’s toolbar additionally has a Draw part, which is current within the desktop model provided that your gadget has a touchscreen. It permits you to choose from a wide range of instruments for drawing or highlighting instantly in your doc together with your finger or a stylus. Missing from the app’s toolbar are Design, References, and Mailings sections; most of these choices are simply scattered throughout different appropriate-seeming areas.

The similar method and expansive function set applies to Excel and PowerPoint as good. There’s actually not a lot of something you cannot do with Microsoft’s Office apps on Android — together with collaboration (as long as your co-workers are additionally within the Microsoft ecosystem) and cloud synchronization: Out of the field, the apps help each native gadget storage and cloud-based storage with Microsoft OneDrive, and in the event you dig round sufficient, you will even discover choices for connecting cloud-based accounts from Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and different suppliers for seamless in-app entry.

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The one asterisk to all of this: In order to get the apps’ full set of options — or to make use of the apps in any respect on units with screens which are 10.1″ or bigger — you will should pay for a Microsoft 365 subscription, which runs $70 per 12 months for people, $100 per 12 months for households (with as much as six customers), or $60 to $240 per consumer per 12 months for companies. That subscription unlocks a laundry listing of superior choices, together with the talents to trace and assessment modifications, change web page orientation, insert web page breaks, and apply customized colours to textual content, shapes, and cells.

Assuming you have already got such a subscription for desktop entry, going with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on Android is just about a no brainer. If you aren’t already subscribed and do not essentially want office apps with oodles of superior options, although, the following possibility is likely to be the higher match for you.

The best Android office apps for extra fundamental wants

Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides

‘Twas a time when Google’s cellular office apps have been barely usable, bare-bones affairs. Make no mistake about it: Those days aren’t any extra.

Nowadays, Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides are completely polished and impressively succesful on-the-go productiveness instruments. They boast tight integration with the broader Google ecosystem, together with a first-class system for syncing, collaboration, and easy cross-device entry.

That final merchandise is a vital a part of the apps’ enchantment. If you are already invested within the Google ecosystem, personally or professionally — utilizing Google Drive for storage, Gmail for e-mail, and so forth — Docs, Sheets, and Slides will match naturally into your present setup. You’ll use your similar Google account to entry them (and you will not even should sign up in any respect out of your telephone, since your account is already related on the working system degree). You’ll have the ability to work on colleagues’ shared recordsdata proper out of your common interface. And every thing you do can be related to your Drive storage and simply accessible from most any Google app on any gadget or platform.

The Docs, Sheets, and Slides Android apps are simple to navigate and have all the essential options you’d count on for their respective classes. In Docs, for occasion, you possibly can fashion textual content, insert tables, regulate alignment, and insert a wide range of various kinds of bulleted lists. In Sheets, you possibly can fashion and merge cells, create charts, and discover and use all kinds of frequent spreadsheet capabilities. And in Slides, you should utilize wealthy formatting instruments, add speaker notes, and insert your personal customized backgrounds.

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Google additionally provides in some distinctive touches, equivalent to Docs’ Explore perform, which lets you search each your previous work and the complete net proper throughout the phrase processor after which view outcomes alongside your doc — even inserting textual content or photographs from different sources instantly into your present work, if the necessity arises. In Sheets, in the meantime, you should utilize Google’s Cast perform to wirelessly present a presentation on any Cast-compatible TV or show with none particular configuration.

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It’s within the extra conventional superior phrase processing, spreadsheet, and presentation instructions that Google’s apps lag a bit behind Microsoft’s — not having the ability to fashion tables inside paperwork from the Docs app, for instance, or not having the ability to type rows inside a spreadsheet in Sheets. If you want these kinds of beyond-the-basics capabilities, Google’s apps will not be proper for you.

Docs, Sheets, and Slides additionally use proprietary Google file codecs as a substitute of the standard Microsoft codecs — however virtually talking, that basically is not an enormous deal anymore. Google makes it extremely simple to import and open any frequent file format, and it makes it equally painless to export and share your recordsdata in any format you want.

Google’s apps are utterly free for particular person use, with none restrictions. For enterprises that require a completely managed setup, the corporate’s G Suite program ranges from $6 per consumer per 30 days for a fundamental setup to $25 per consumer per 30 days for the totally featured enterprise association.

The best Android app for creating, modifying, and annotating PDFs

Xodo PDF Reader & Editor

The one perform all of those apps are lacking is the power to create, edit, and mark up PDFs for your telephone. For that, Xodo PDF Reader & Editor is the instrument you’ll want to spherical out your cellular office suite setup. The free utility has every thing you possibly can presumably require for cellular PDF administration — and it is extremely simple to make use of.

Xodo permits you to create new PDFs from photographs, paperwork, and net pages. It’ll even allow you to create a clean PDF, which you’ll then fill with your personal textual content or handwritten components. The app has a easy function for merging a number of PDFs collectively right into a single file and even modifying present PDFs so as to add, take away, or change the order of their pages.

On the annotation entrance, Xodo offers a sturdy set of instruments for highlighting textual content, underlining textual content, including new textual content or handwritten components, and including Post-It-like feedback onto a PDF. It additionally has a signature function that permits you to signal any PDF on the spot or retailer your signature so you possibly can stamp it with a few fast faucets sooner or later.

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Seems to good to be true for a free app, proper? That was actually my first thought: What’s the catch? But Xodo swears it by no means collects or shops any personally identifiable information or makes an attempt to promote any of your knowledge as a part of this program. Instead, the corporate depends on enterprise licensing and the licensing of its underlying expertise to show a revenue. Win-win, proper?

And with that, your Android office app power-pack is full. Time to take a quick break (I like to recommend a grape soda) after which take into consideration what different classes of standout software program may assist supercharge your cellular productiveness setup. Email and texting apps? Printing and scanning apps? Note-taking apps? Travel apps? Maybe some intelligent apps for making your telephone extra environment friendly?

Whatever you want, I’ve obtained you lined.

This article was initially revealed in October 2018 and up to date in July 2020.