\n<\/p>\n
Microsoft\u2019s Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are now available to download for free on Meta\u2019s Quest VR headsets, as reported by Android Central<\/em><\/a>. They appear to be the web versions of the apps, so while there\u2019s a lot that\u2019s very familiar about them, after giving the apps a whirl from inside a Quest 3, I can tell you that the virtual office experience still has a few quirks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The first hurdle is logging in. While you don\u2019t need a paid Microsoft 365 account, when I opened up Word, I had to log in by typing my long Microsoft account password. (The option to log in with a security key failed when I tried it; the other choices were to log in with a GitHub account or a company account.) Since I don\u2019t have a Bluetooth keyboard lying around, that meant I had to manually type in every single character using the Quest 3\u2019s Touch Plus controllers and the on-screen keyboard.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n To make that process easier, I pasted my password into a document on my laptop, blew up the font, and used the Quest 3\u2019s full-color passthrough to see my laptop\u2019s screen as I typed the password into Word in VR. Mixed reality! <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Once I got access to Word, I found that Word on Quest looks like, well, Word. But even though it works<\/em> in VR, it\u2019s not optimized<\/em> for VR, so I found myself running into a lot of trouble selecting Word\u2019s tiny formatting icons or moving my cursor when I was using the Touch Plus. I spent about 10 minutes typing up a short document, mostly using hand tracking and the Quest on-screen keyboard. While the keyboard worked better than when I last wrote about it<\/a>, it was still much<\/em> slower than using even a touchscreen keyboard.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Basically, for the app to be remotely useful for productivity, it seems like you\u2019ll need to pair a Bluetooth mouse and a keyboard. That\u2019s not exactly surprising \u2014 physical keyboards are a great way to type things quickly! \u2014 but I was hoping for changes to make the app easier to use in VR. My experience was broadly the same in PowerPoint and Excel; good luck trying to select cells in a spreadsheet without a mouse. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n If you want to try the apps yourself, you can download them for free from Meta\u2019s Quest marketplace. (Here are links to Word<\/a>, Excel<\/a>, and PowerPoint<\/a>.) The apps are compatible with the Quest, Quest 2, Quest 3, and Quest Pro.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n