The Microsoft Office update for Android adds dual screen support on LG phones

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Microsoft Office on mobile has had a long history. Office Mobile was first released for the deprecated Windows Mobile OS back in the late 2000s. Then, Microsoft brought it to Windows Phone, but the functionality was quite limited as it wasn’t even on par with other productivity apps. The modern Office apps’ inception was actually on iOS, and not on Windows Phone. The company separately released the Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps for iOS, before bringing them to Android in June 2015. The apps were launched for Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile later that year. Their functionality was better than Google’s Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps on Android, as they offered quite a few of the advanced features that the desktop applications offer on Windows and macOS.

In November 2019, Microsoft integrated the functionality of the three apps into a single Office app and released it as a beta for Android and iOS, complete with support for the company’s Fluent design language, which it wants third-party Android app developers to adopt. This month, the stable and all-in-one Microsoft Office app was released on the Play Store. Users no longer have to install three different apps from Microsoft, and the company is offering more convenience than Google’s productivity apps in this respect. The Office app on Android now also supports the Dual Screen attachment on recent LG phones, which include the LG V50 ThinQ, LG G8X ThinQ, and the new LG V60 ThinQ. This is shown off by a user in the videos linked here.

The dual-screen support lets users use both displays on the device as different monitors. They can open a Word document on the primary display and edit a PowerPoint presentation on the second display, for example. It’s intended as a boost to productivity. Microsoft presumably added this feature in preparation for its own dual-screen device, the Surface Duo, which is on track to be released in Fall 2020. While we wait for the Surface Duo to come to market, users of the Dual Screen attachment on the aforementioned LG phones can benefit from dual screen support on the Office app and increase their productivity.

Thanks to William Richardson for sharing these videos with us.