Added Office integrations to Outlook for iOS make collaboration easier

If you’ve noticed a few changes in the way Outlook on iOS handles attachments, that’s due to an update Microsoft rolled out this week that brings tighter integration between the app and Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The basic viewer hasn’t been scrapped just yet: It still opens if you haven’t download the corresponding Office app, and provides an app store link to do so.

First and foremost, Outlook for iOS users can now open and edit documents from Word, Excel and PowerPoint directly in the native Office apps.

The update is designed to make it easier to collaborate on and share Office documents through Outlook, and also makes the app a platform to prompt users who haven’t installed the Office apps to do so.

Further, updates to the integration between Outlook and the Office apps include sending attachments more seamlessly. That’s because Office for Windows has had rich integration between these apps “for decades”, as Microsoft pointed out. This is for the cases where you’re starting in the document, not in an email: Selecting “Send with Outlook” brings up Outlook’s “Compose New Email” pane with the document attached and ready to share.

Microsoft has also streamlined the process required for collaborating on files sent as attachments. 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.

These updates are only for iOS at the moment, though the blog post does say the company expects to push similar functionality to Android devices “in the next couple of months”.