Back in September, Microsoft teased an interesting new feature at its annual Ignite conference: Insert Data from Picture — a combination of OCR (optical character recognition) and AI (unicorn dust) that promises to convert pesky printed material into rows of editable Excel data (the office format of champions). Beta users of Excel for Android were supposed to get the feature "soon," which turned out to be five months later — it's now live, and works pretty well for a first iteration.
Read MoreNew feature in Microsoft Excel app for Android turns photos of data tables into spreadsheets
Microsoft's annual Ignite conference kicked off today in Orlando, bringing with it a number of product announcements primarily directed at IT and enterprise customers. However, there are a few updates that are also of interest to Android Police readers, including a new Excel app feature that turns a picture of a data table into a spreadsheet. The Redmond, Washington-based tech giant also announced a search tool that spans across most of its products and some Microsoft Teams updates.
Read MoreInBrief
Google Sheets finally supports recording macros, adds row grouping and better spreadsheets printing
Google has announced a series of new features for Sheets today, including macro support and improvements to spreadsheet printing. While Google Sheets has long been perfectly capable of creating and handling basic or even moderately complex spreadsheets, it fails to fully replicate the functionality of Microsoft Excel, making it a nonstarter for most power users. For professional use cases, Excel still reigns supreme, and Google needs to address Sheets' shortcomings if it ever hopes to make it a viable alternative for professional customers.
Read MoreInBrief
Microsoft Office Android apps now available on all Chromebooks
For years, one of the most common complaints about Chromebooks was that they couldn't run the Office suite of applications. Microsoft has offered Android apps for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for a few years now, but they weren't made available to all Chromebooks for some reason.
Read MoreSmall Microsoft Office updates for PowerPoint, Excel, and Word add in whiteboard capture and form control file opening
After Google improved the Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps a few weeks ago, Microsoft is responding with updates to the Android apps for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The update adds small, incremental improvements which won't matter to the vast majority, but for a little subset of users, might be the thing that gets them to use one or all of the apps.
Microsoft PowerPoint
The major thing that's new in PowerPoint is the ability to share only one slide. It can get really annoying when to send one slide in a presentation of many slides, you have to send the entire thing and say 'look at slide 22,' or whatever.
Read MoreMicrosoft adds more cloud storage options to Office apps on Android
Third-party cloud storage platforms like Dropbox and Box have been available in desktop versions of Microsoft Office for a few years, but the mobile versions have been much more limited. Oh, they supported OneDrive, but who uses that? Starting today, you have new storage options and a few more on on the way.
Read MoreThe Best Of AP
Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel updated with better sharing features
Microsoft has long since abandoned the strategy of keeping its apps and services confined to its own platform. Windows Phone didn't really work out, so it's not like there's another option. Microsoft's Word, PowerPoint, and Excel apps are getting a nice update today on Android that makes them better at handling shared content. PowerPoint also gets some UI tweaks.
Read MoreMicrosoft Office apps get inking and SD card support, Word gets touch-friendly tables
In the latest series of updates to Microsoft's Office apps for Android, the headlining feature is inking support with a couple of other minor additions. Of those, the one most likely to affect your day-to-day use is that each app now allows for saving to SD cards.
Still, the most exciting part of these updates is inking. As the name suggests, this is digital ink. You can draw with your finger or stylus, as I did in the image below. If you have a phone or tablet with an active digitizer like the Samsung Note series, they will support those pressure-sensitive features as well.
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