The essential office apps for Android

The days of taking care of business exclusively in an office are over. You’ve got a powerful productivity system in your pocket practically 24/7, after all — and with the right set of apps, you can stay synced with the same spreadsheets, documents, and presentations that are on your desktop and work with ’em seamlessly from anywhere.

Best of all? These days, achieving that level of connectivity on Android doesn’t require any kind of compromise. The bar’s really been raised when it comes to office app quality in the Play Store over the past several years, particularly compared to the limited landscape we saw in the platform’s earlier days. The question at this point isn’t if you can find a worthwhile set of office apps for your phone but rather which set of commendable offerings makes the most sense for you.

And to be clear: We’re talkin’ traditional office apps here, not their more contemporary AI-centric cousins. Generative AI apps can certainly be useful in the right sort of scenario — from web-based AI apps that offer a helping hand with presentation creation to Android-specific AI apps that assist in all sorts of interesting ways — but sometimes, you just need a solid tool for standard work that fits in naturally with everything else you’re using. And, of course, many of these apps do now offer some manner of AI elements, too, if and when you want ’em.

I’ve spent time testing all the current contenders, ranging from the small-name efforts that used to dominate my recommendations to the big-name products from prominent productivity players. Focusing on factors such as feature availability, ease of use, ecosystem integration, and overall user experience, these are the best office apps on Android today.

Looking for email apps? See my roundup of the best email and texting apps for Android.

The best fully featured Android office apps

Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

Microsoft was embarrassingly late to the Android app party, but since the company started taking the world’s most popular operating system seriously some years back, its Android productivity services have been among the best around.

That remains true today with its core Microsoft 365, a.k.a. Microsoft Office, offerings: Word, for word processing; Excel, for spreadsheet editing; and PowerPoint, for presentation work. If you’re used to using the equivalent Microsoft 365/Office 365 products on the desktop — or if you just need fully featured mobile office apps with all the bells and whistles — Microsoft’s trio of Android apps is going to be your best all-around option for on-the-go productivity.

If you’re planning to use all three apps, you can also now download them in a space-saving and easier-to-manage all-in-one Microsoft 365 bundle (which is confusingly branded as “Microsoft 365 Copilot,” not to be mixed up with the other non-Office-associated Microsoft Copilot chatbot app — insert over-the-top facepalming here).

Perhaps the greatest strength of Microsoft’s Android apps is their effortless cross-platform compatibility and consistency: First, as you’d expect, all three apps handle standard Office file formats flawlessly and with pristine formatting fidelity. And beyond that, if you’re already using Word, Excel, or PowerPoint in any other setting, you’ll have little to no learning curve with the matching Android versions. The apps’ interfaces and interaction styles aren’t identical to their desktop and web environments, but they’re similar enough to make sense and be quite easy to master.

When you’re actively working on a document in the Word Android app, for instance, you see a small, scrollable toolbar at the bottom of the screen — a sized-down version of the traditional Office Ribbon at the top of a document in a desktop view. It’s a smart way to conserve space and allow you to have a large working area (especially when a virtual keyboard is present and taking up a significant portion of your screen).

Tapping an arrow at the toolbar’s right side, meanwhile, expands the toolbar into a larger form with menu sections corresponding to most of the Ribbon tabs you see in Word’s desktop or web app: Home, with common commands for basic text formatting; Insert, with the standard full range of options; Layout, with commands for adjusting your document’s margins, orientation, column configuration, and so on; Review, for checking spelling or word count, managing comments, and activating Track Changes mode; and View, for moving between different layouts and zoom settings.

Microsoft Word’s toolbar in its sized-down, scrollable form (at left) and when fully expanded (at right).
JR Raphael / Foundry

The Word app’s toolbar also has a Draw section, which is present in the desktop version only if your device has a touchscreen. It allows you to select from a variety of tools for drawing or highlighting directly on your document with your finger or a stylus. (The standard Word References section is curiously missing in this context, though most of the associated options are just scattered across other appropriate-seeming areas.)

The same approach and expansive feature set applies to Excel and PowerPoint as well. There’s really not much you can’t do with Microsoft’s Office apps on Android — including collaboration (as long as your co-workers are also in the Microsoft ecosystem) and cloud synchronization: Out of the box, the apps support both local device storage and cloud-based storage with Microsoft OneDrive, and if you dig around enough, you’ll even find options for connecting cloud-based accounts from Dropbox, Google Drive, and other providers for seamless in-app access.

Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint provide familiar and feature-packed interfaces on Android.
JR Raphael / Foundry

The one asterisk to all of this: In order to get the apps’ complete set of features — or to use the apps at all on tablet-sized devices — you’ll have to pay for a Microsoft 365 subscription, which runs $100 per year for individuals, $130 per year for families (with up to six users), or $72 to $264 per user per year for businesses. Those subscriptions include a bunch of Copilot AI features, though with a suspiciously vague description of exactly how much you’re able to use the features within any given month. (Officially, Microsoft says you get a monthly allotment of credits that “should be enough for most subscribers.” Riiiiiiiight.)

All AI ambiguity aside, assuming you already have such a subscription for desktop access, going with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on Android is pretty much a no-brainer. If you aren’t already subscribed and don’t necessarily need office apps with oodles of advanced features, though, our next option might be the better fit for you.

The best Android office apps for more basic needs

Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides

‘Twas a time when Google’s mobile office apps were barely usable, bare-bones affairs. Make no mistake about it: Those days are no more.

Nowadays, Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides are thoroughly polished and impressively capable on-the-go productivity tools. They boast tight integration with the broader Google ecosystem, along with a first-class system for syncing, collaboration, and effortless cross-device access.

That last item is a critical part of the apps’ appeal. If you’re already invested in the Google ecosystem, personally or professionally — using Google Drive for storage, Gmail for email, and so on — Docs, Sheets, and Slides will fit naturally into your existing setup. You’ll use your same Google account to access them (and you won’t even have to sign in at all from your phone, since your account is already connected at the operating system level). You’ll be able to work on colleagues’ shared files right from your regular interface. And everything you do will be connected to your Drive storage and easily accessible from most any Google app on any device or platform.

The Docs, Sheets, and Slides Android apps are easy to navigate and have all the basic features you’d expect for their respective categories. In Docs, for instance, you can style text, insert tables, adjust alignment, and insert a variety of different types of bulleted lists. In Sheets, you can style and merge cells, create charts, and find and use all sorts of common spreadsheet functions. And in Slides, you can use rich formatting tools, add speaker notes, and insert your own custom backgrounds.

Google Docs and Sheets have easy-to-use interfaces with all the basic features you’d expect.
JR Raphael / Foundry

It’s with the more advanced word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation commands that Google’s apps lag a bit behind Microsoft’s — not being able to style tables within documents from the Docs app, for example, or not being able to sort rows within a spreadsheet in Sheets. If you need those sorts of beyond-the-basics capabilities, Google’s apps won’t be right for you.

In addition, the mobile apps surprisingly don’t sport many AI elements as of yet, which is slightly shocking, really, given how aggressively Google is shoving Gemini into our faces everywhere else thesedays — including within the browser-based Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps. For now, the Docs Android app does have certain limited Gemini functions available for organizations on the $168-per-user-per-year Workplace Business Standard plan and higher, including an AI-provided document summary command, the ability to create an AI-generated draft based on a prompt, and the option to ask Gemini questions about the document you’re viewing.

Other Gemini features are not yet present, and Sheets and Slides are still free from any and all Gemini-related elements — for now. Whether that’s a drawback or a positive, of course, is completely up to your interpretation.

Last but not least, Docs, Sheets, and Slides also use proprietary Google file formats instead of the typical Microsoft formats — but practically speaking, that really isn’t a big deal anymore. Google makes it incredibly easy to import and open any common file format, and it makes it equally painless to export and share your files in any format you need.

Google’s apps are completely free for individual use, without any restrictions. For companies and organizations that require a fully managed setup, the Google Workspace suite ranges from $84 per user per year for a basic setup to $264 per user per year for the fully featured “Business Plus” plan — and onward from there for customized enterprise-level arrangements.

The best Android app for creating, editing, and annotating PDFs

Adobe Acrobat Reader

The one function all of these apps are missing is the ability to manage PDFs from your phone. For that, Adobe’s Acrobat Reader Android app is the tool you need to round out your mobile office suite setup. The free (for these purposes) utility has everything you could possibly require for mobile PDF management — and it’s by far the easiest way to view, sign, and edit PDFs on Android.

Even just for basic reading of a PDF, Reader’s one-tap “liquid” function forces a document’s typically static text into an adaptive format that actually makes it legible on a small screen without any awkward zooming. And when you need to sign or mark up a PDF in any way, Reader’s got you covered with an array of options for scribbling directly on your screen or inserting a variety of ready-to-roll elements — including your own saved signatures, if you have (or create) an Adobe account where those are stored.

Adobe’s Acrobat Reader app takes the pain out of editing and viewing PDFs on Android.
JR Raphael / Foundry

Acrobat Reader does offer a premium subscription with a variety of advanced options, including AI elements — but for most typical on-the-go PDF purposes, you really won’t need it. The app’s regular, free tier will handle everything you require.

And with that, your Android office app power-pack is complete. Time to take a brief break (I recommend a grape soda) and then think about what other categories of standout software could help supercharge your Android productivity setup. Note-taking apps? Calendar apps? Travel apps? Apps for team collaboration? Maybe some must-have Android widgets or clever apps for making your phone more efficient?

Whatever you need, I’ve got you covered.

This article was originally published in October 2018 and most recently updated in June 2025.