According to Android Central, Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint can now be downloaded for free on Meta’s Quest VR headsets. They seem to be the web versions of the apps, so even while they have a lot of recognizable features, I can tell you that there are still a few oddities with the virtual office experience after using the apps from within a Quest 3 VR.
The initial challenge is signing in. Even though a premium Microsoft 365 account is not required, I had to enter my lengthy Microsoft account password to access Word. (I tried using a security key, but it didn’t work; I had to log in with either a company account or a GitHub account.) I had to manually type in every character using the Touch Plus controllers and the on-screen keyboard on the Quest 3 because I didn’t have a Bluetooth keyboard floating around.
To streamline the procedure, I copied my password into a laptop document, enlarged the font, and utilized the full-color passthrough feature of the Quest 3 to view my laptop’s screen while entering the password into Word in virtual reality. Contradictory reality!
Upon gaining access to Word, I discovered that Word on Quest resembles Word itself. It’s not geared for VR, though, so even while it functions in VR, I was having a lot of difficulty using Touch Plus to choose Word’s tiny formatting buttons or moving my pointer. I typed a brief document for around ten minutes, primarily using the Quest on-screen keyboard and hand tracking. Even with its improvements, the keyboard was still far slower than using a touchscreen, even if it performed better than when I previously wrote about it.
It appears that pairing a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard is a prerequisite for the program to have any productivity-boosting value. That shouldn’t come as a surprise because using a physical keyboard is a wonderful method to text rapidly, but I had hoped that the software would be improved for VR users. I had essentially the same issue with both PowerPoint and Excel; try selecting cells in a spreadsheet without a mouse.
You can download the apps for free from Meta’s Quest marketplace if you’d like to give them a try. (These are Word, Excel, and PowerPoint links.) The Quest, Quest 2, Quest 3, and Quest Pro are all compatible with the apps.
Office apps, Teams, Windows, and Xbox Cloud Gaming were all mentioned by Microsoft and Meta in 2022 as being available on Quest headsets. This week saw the release of the Xbox Cloud Gaming app. Additionally, Microsoft is attempting to integrate Teams, Word, and Excel with Apple’s Vision Pro.
