Microsoft Office goes completely free for Android phones

Alongside the big news of Microsoft's Office launching on Apple’s iPad, Microsoft is making Office for Android completely free to use on phones.

The Office app was available for iPhone and Android phones for free before, but you needed to have a paid Office 365 subscription in order to make any use of it. Now you don't need the subscription to create, edit, or save documents on your smartphone, you only need a Microsoft account, you can create one for free if you’re not set up already. (Full editing on the new iPad version still requires an Office 365 subscription.)

The latest version of Office for Android is now available in the Google Play Store, not requiring an Office 365 subscription.

Though you don't get all the features present in desktop version, you can still do some basic editing. As for Word documents, you can type, search, add comments and perform some basic font formatting, nothing more. In Excel, you can search, filter and perform five simple mathematical functions. You can open existing PowerPoint files and edit slide text, but you can't create new presentations with Office Mobile.

Office Mobile Android is free for home use. Microsoft still expects you to pay up and get yourself an Office 365 subscription if you plan on using Office for business uses, though.

As for the an Android tablet version of Office, no such luck for tablet users. But you can still use an alternative to Microsoft Office Mobile like QuickOffice, Kingsoft Office or OfficeSuite 7.

Well, If you want my opinion, QuickOffice, which I'm currently using on my S4, fulfills my basic needs for editing documents and taking general notes etc. The thing which makes it different or shall we say better than MS Office Mobile is the options available to open files from Internal memory or SD Card from inside the app. On the downside. none of the two apps provide any way to open password protected files.

Whereas, Kingsoft Office and OfficeSuite 7 provide much more as pre-built templates and charts in the Pro version, which is not available in neither QuickOffice nor MS Office Mobile for android. If you need full editing ability in your office suite you should consider Kingsoft Office or OfficeSuite 7.