Microsoft announced changes to how its mobile applications, such as Outlook, OneDrive, and Teams, handle Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on iOS and Android. The company says it received a lot of feedback from confused customers who did not understand how the apps should work with the unified Microsoft 365 app and standalone Office applications.

To address the confusion, Microsoft made some changes to file handling in mobile Office apps. If you have the Microsoft 365 app alongside standalone Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps, opening files from Outlook, OneDrive, and Teams will launch their respective apps, not the Microsoft 365 app.

If a user has only the Microsoft 365 app, nothing will change -- files will continue opening in the Microsoft 365 app. And if no apps are installed, Outlook, OneDrve, and Teams will open the App Store or the Google Play Store and prompt to download Word, Excel, or PowerPoint instead of the Microsoft 365 app.

Here is how Microsoft explains these changes:

Our goal is to improve predictability for how files get opened when starting from our key "hub" experiences on mobile devices (OneDrive, Outlook, Teams) - the standalone Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps if installed will essentially be favored to handle file open operations. For customers who want to open more than one Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file at once, the standalone apps can better handle side by side and windowing scenarios that modern tablet and mobile operating systems support.

The updated file handling experience is now available in OneDrive on iOS and Android. Outlook will get it in November, and the timeline for Teams is currently "being finalized." If you want to learn more about how Microsoft's productivity apps work with Office files, check out the official announcement post on the Tech Community forums.