Outlook for iOS can now edit attachments with Office apps

Microsoft improved the way its popular Office apps – Word, Excel and PowerPoint – function in its Outlook for iOS app, according to a blog post from the company’s Office Team.

If you don’t have the other Office apps installed, Outlook still shows you previews in its simple viewer, with suggestion to download the free apps. Users simply tap on the file in Outlook, which opens in Word, Excel or PowerPoint.

As Microsoft put it, this is a huge step forward for collaborating on attachments in iOS: “To date, this activity was nearly exclusively done at a computer, due to the many manual and sometimes confusing steps necessary when using the built-in Mail app for iOS”.

Further, updates to the integration between Outlook and the Office apps include sending attachments more seamlessly.

It is no trouble at all to locate attachments in Outlook for iOS, thanks to a rather convenient Attachments tab which will showcase all of the files received or sent by you.

In addition, if the users are working on documents in Word, Excel or PowerPoint, a new “Send with Outlook” option in the Share menu attaches their file to a new email and allows them to start composing their message instantly. Microsoft says that the new integration should come to Android users within the next few months. Since Microsoft doesn’t want to share a change log, we’ll just have to dig around ourselves it seems.