Unveiling Microsoft 365’S New Innovative Widget for Enhanced User Experience

The Microsoft 365 app is the one-stop shop for Office apps, Copilot, and other tools on your iPhone, iPad, or Android device. Now, there’s a new widget to help you jump back into your recent documents.

Microsoft is rolling out a new home screen widget to the Microsoft 365 app on iPhone and iPad, called Recent Files. As you might be able to guess from the name, it’s a widget that shows your recent files and documents from OneDrive and your Microsoft Office cloud data, with the ability to tap on them to instantly jump to that file. You can also tap outside the file list to open the Microsoft 365 app.

The widget is available in three sizes, showing one file, two files, or four files. The home page for the Microsoft 365 app already shows your recent documents, so this new widget just saves you a tap. There’s also an extra large widget option available on iPads.

Microsoft

Microsoft said in a blog post, “You can add Recent Files widgets for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint directly to your iPhone or iPad home screen. The widgets allow you to both view and open your most recently accessed files in that app from the home screen on your device.”

The Microsoft 365 app has received a few other great improvements recently. The ability to sign PDFs was added last year, and earlier this year, full support for the Apple Vision Pro was rolled out. Microsoft also added its Copilot AI assistant to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents in the app, but that functionality is only available for business and organization accounts right now. The rest of us just get a tab for quick access to the Copilot chatbot, which works just like the chatbot in Bing, the dedicated Copilot app, Skype, and every other Microsoft mobile app.

The new widget is currently restricted to Microsoft 365 Insiders with version 2.85 of the app on an iPhone or iPad. It should roll out to everyone on iPhone and iPad after any bugs are worked out, but there’s no word on an equivalent Android widget just yet.

Source: Microsoft 365 Blog

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