Single App or Multiple Apps? How to Best Use Microsoft Office on your iPhone & iPad

The choices for Microsoft Office on iPhones and iPads is a bit confusing these days, but Microsoft Office has a long, but interesting and curious, history running on Apple devices.

And while there have routinely been Microsoft Office applications for the Mac, it has been a bit of a different story on the iPhone and iPad. When the iPad was introduced in 2010, there were no official Microsoft Office apps available for the iPad. At the time, Microsoft was telling you that if you wanted a full Microsoft Office experience, you should use a Surface. So when we wanted to edit a Microsoft Word document on the iPad, we had to use a smattering of other apps to get the job done.

But in Feb. 2014, Microsoft named a new CEO, and things changed … Mr. Nadella changed courses for Microsoft saying they were focusing on a “mobile first, cloud first” approach. And that meant that Microsoft stopped worrying about which device you used to work in Microsoft Office, and finally released an OFFICIAL Microsoft Word app for the iPad! (along with an Excel and PowerPoint app as well)

Then in Feb. 2021, Microsoft released the SINGLE Office App for the iPad which they had already done for the iPhone a year before in Feb. 2020.

So now there’s a little bit of confusion as to which app (or apps) what you should use.

It seems like Microsoft’s goal in creating the single/combined/unified Office app was to provide an app for folks where the individual apps were a bit of overkill. To be clear, the functionality of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are the same regardless of whether you’re using the single Office app, or the individual Office apps, but the single Office App does offer some additional “Actions” that you can’t find in the individual Office apps.

Some of the “Actions” that you’ll find in the single Office app include the ability to wirelessly transfer files between your computer and iPad / iPhone, extract text or tables from pictures, and a wide variety of PDF-related Actions such as Sign a PDF, Scan to PDF, and PDF to Word.

The good news is that you can have all of these apps available on your iPad at the same time – you can install the single Office app and run it alongside the individual Office apps without a problem.

There is one quasi-limitation: the individual Office apps support Split-View on the iPad, so you can have two Microsoft Word documents open at the same time. But the single Office app can’t do Split-View yet. But you could have the Single Office App open, and then a separate instance of Word that you can pull up in Split-View.