Dropbox’s Mobile Apps Are Now Integrated With Microsoft Office

Earlier this month, Dropbox and Microsoft announced a partnership that would see Dropbox offer better support for Microsoft’s Office Suite, including the ability to edit Office docs from the Dropbox mobile app among other things. Today, those integrations have gone live for users of both the Android phone and iOS Dropbox applications.

Explains Dropbox in a blog post announcing the news, users can now edit their Office files when they’re “on the go,” editing them directly from the Dropbox app and accessing the files directly from the Office apps. To use the new feature, you’ll first need update your app to the latest version, then open any Office document, spreadsheet or presentation that’s stored in your Dropbox.

From here, a new “Edit” icon (see above picture) will be available that will allow you to switch over to the new mobile Office apps to make changes to the file. When you’re finished working, those changes will be saved back to Dropbox automatically.

The Dropbox/Microsoft partnership is an extensive deal aimed at increasing collaboration between the two firms, and may have surprised some given that the two companies offer competing products. Microsoft has a Dropbox-like service called OneDrive, but Dropbox’s larger service reaches hundreds of millions of users, including 80,000 businesses.

The agreement announced at the beginning of November included four parts, as TechCrunch previously reported: the ability to quickly edit docs from Dropbox on mobile, accessing Dropbox docs from Office apps, sharing Dropbox links of Office apps, and the creation of first-party Dropbox apps for Microsoft’s mobile offerings.