Explore the Office interface on a phone

- [Instructor] The Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps all share the same basic interface design, but that interface is significantly different between Android phones and Android tablets. In this movie, let's see the interface on an Android phone. I'm going to launch the Word app, and there are two main things that you'll want to do here, create a new document or open an existing document. Near the top right is a button with a plus sign on it. We can tap on that to create a new document. First, in this Create In menu, you need to choose where this new document will be saved. And there are few recent locations listed here.

But to choose a different specific folder, you'll tap on this option that says Select a different location. The main options here are to save the file on my device's internal storage drive or on OneDrive, a cloud storage tool that's tied to my Microsoft account. Or if you use SharePoint with your Office account, that option is there too. I'm going to save this to OneDrive, so I'm going to select that. And then I'll choose a specific folder, tap Select. Then I need to choose a template to start from. And there are lots of templates listed here, or you may just want to start with the blank document template.

I'm going to choose that one. So now I have a blank document, and I can start typing in some text. Next, it's important to be able to switch in and out of the typing mode. Android devices have a back button built into the device's interface, but it may look different on different devices. On my phone, it's a down-facing arrow at the bottom left corner. Tap on that, and the on-screen keyboard goes away. Now you can see the full document interface.

And you've got this toolbar up at the top. On the far right side of the toolbar, there's this button with three dots on it, which opens up this menu. And this is where you go for save options and printing and a few other things. Now at this point, to type on the document again, just tap on the document to bring up the on-screen keyboard. But there's something important here. I'm going to tap the back button on my device again to dismiss the keyboard. But this time, I'm going to tap on the check button that has appeared in the top left corner. That means I'm finished editing the document.

I've left the edit mode. Now if I tap on the document, nothing happens. This is usually what you have when you first open a document. If I want to get back into the editing mode from here, I need to tap the edit button in the bar at the top. That's the button that looks like a pencil. Now I'm back in the editing mode. I can tap somewhere to place the cursor, and I could type in some more text. If you use the Office applications on a computer, you may expect to see the ribbons at the top of the screen.

But the Office apps on a smartphone use what is called the vertical ribbon. So tap this arrow button, and we see the vertical ribbon. This is where you get a bunch of controls for working on your document. Now right now I'm in the home ribbon, which is where you find controls for formatting text. To get to one of the other ribbons, you can just tap on this. It opens up this menu. You can select a different ribbon, which gives you different controls. So you can jump through the different ribbons to explore the controls that you have. Tap the arrow button again to bring back the on-screen keyboard.

Now I'm finished editing this document for now, so I'm going to tap the back button on my device to dismiss the keyboard. I'll tap the check mark up in the top left corner. Now that has changed to a back button up in the top left corner. And if I tap that, it closes the document. So next, to open an existing document, you've got some options down at the bottom. You can browse from recently opened documents, documents that were shared with you through Office 365, or you can tap Open to browse different storage locations.

So I want to go to my OneDrive and to the folder that we just used to save the document I created, and there's that document we created a moment ago. All I need to do is tap on it to open that document. Now when you open a document, it's in the read-only mode until you tap the edit button up at the top. And now you're in the editing mode, and you can get to work with the document from here. So clearly, there's more to be learned in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but this is the core interface that you'll be working in if you're using an Android phone.