Office Mobile apps receive Fluent Design treatment on Windows 10 PC

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If you're a Windows Insider running the latest Insider Preview builds, we've got some good news for you. Microsoft is now rolling out an update to its Office Mobile apps that add Fluent Design elements to Word, PowerPoint and Excel! The apps now feature the reveal highlight effect and Acrylic blur in some areas.

The addition of Fluent Design within the Office Mobile apps is certainly a welcome addition, as it adds a hint of polish to what are already great productivity apps for lightweight editing. You can find the reveal effect in the header area of the apps, as well as in the recent documents list, and you can find Acrylic in the same places too.

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear the OneNote app has any of these new Fluent Design elements. But now that Office Mobile Word, PowerPoint and Excel have it, we imagine OneNote will quickly catch up. As of right now, the Fluent Design updates for Office Mobile are available in the Fast ring for Insiders.

Zac Bowden
Zac Bowden

Zac Bowden is a Senior Editor at Windows Central. Bringing you exclusive coverage into the world of Windows 10 on PCs, tablets, phones, and more. Also an avid collector of rare Microsoft prototype devices! Keep in touch on Twitter: @zacbowden.
33 Comments
  • Nice!!
  • This clears up one doubt fans of the Mobile apps had. They won't kill these. These apps were not searchable in the store a while back.
  • Nice... I wish they just had an excellent built in help for Mobile apps. I am always on my phone trying to figure out how to do certain things in mobile. Like how to move a picture once I insert it into OneNote.
  • Look for the 💡 icon to the right of the header. Click it and you can ask how to do things in natural language, almost like Cortana.
  • Thank you
  • I hope it will arrive soon on Office 365. :D
  • Looks pretty good on Office Mobile.
  • It's so unnecessary and misleading. UX nightmare just because some dev thought that this might be something 'cool' without consulting with any UX/UI specialists. Same story again like we saw with first Metro Designs implemented in WP7.x and Zune - it was all downhill from there :/
    BTW: Why the hell ACTIVE windows are transparent, there's no logic behind all of this :/
  • Metro was actually lauded by many respected UX designers as one of the best mobile experiences of its time.
  • Yeah, Metro was actually liked by a number of UX designers, even won an award. Especially the time when Apple was all-out skeuomorphism which became overdone, Microsoft Metro with its flat-design approach was fresh and did many things right than bad especially when you looked beyond aesthetics which can be bit subjective. Metro did make the flat design on UI mainstream beyond some websites that already taking principles out of it.  
  • Sure it was, and this is what I'm saying - Metro was amazing in terms of UX and its unique UI but since first WP7.x they were just watering it down and now with these non touch friendly highlights, blurrs in Fluent Design its another level of destroing great ideas from Metro :/
  • I doubt it went even near something close as you described, especially in a big company like Microsoft. 
  • It may be unnecessary, but when done right it actually enhances the overall UX of Windows. The problem was Microsoft just can't implement these things more completely that it will make everything consistent, and yeah sometimes the implementation can be questionable. Though I think its not fair about the Metro which was even rewarded. Yes, aesthetically there may be a question such as the huge headers, but the principles were actually right that they have forgotten between Windows 8.X PC and Windows 10 MDL2. They did some mess after WP. In regards to why only active windows are transparent, it is odd indeed. The only thing I can make sense of it is to conserve GPU resources by only rendering blurred effects on one active window, though we didn't really have a problem with Windows 7 since then, so it kinda doesn't make sense now with specs are way better these days. Other than that, it doesn't make sense really. I actually rather have translucent windows for inactive windows while active to be opaque or less transparent. That way it will make active window way more distinguishable from inactive ones, better than the 1px ugly borders that we have now.
  • Loved metro because it improved usability. This, not so much. Would like to see more functionality from Outlook for the desktop integrated into mobile. Hopefully it will be in the next incarnation of "handheld" devices that will be the new mobile, I just don't want to pay an arm and a leg for it.
  • Haha, sorry but seems like people are disagree with your opinion.
  • Is this on mobile 📱 too?
  • It is
  • meh transparencey 
  • reveal highlight also.
  • its sooooooooooooooooo annoying when they call it a design language yet all they do is give the app some transparencey 
  • It's coming in waves the first wave will be made up of: Light,depth, motion, material,scale. if you wanna get a feel for more of things that are coming. You should check out the channel 9 video.
  • Yeah, well that's what we expect, or at least for me, but they are not actually even accomplishing their Wave 1 milestone. We only get Light and Material so far. Motion? A lot of areas in the OS have a poor choice of animations or even non-existent. Depth? Well the parallax is actually there now in Windows Store on some store items. Across or most areas of the OS? I haven't seen any so far. Even about Light which Reval Highlight is under are not implemented on most areas that are mostly visible on user such as on Taskbar, Live Tiles, window controls (Back, Maximized/Restore, Minimized, Close), Buttons and other UI elements. It seems that what the Wave 1 is for them is basically just showcasing these new elements, but not consistently to all of their own apps and all ovbious areas in the OS. It also doesn't fix the incosistencies of design that doesn't even need to put new Fluent Design elements.
    Basically there is no 'complete' cohesion of Fluent Design to fix the inconsistencies, no actual refresh like what Vista and Mac OS X Yosemite did. Even XP at least visually more consistent at launch.
  • Well, it is a new design language, but yeah it's only bits of it that it should be even considered a 'language; yet. We only get the few elements and the UX is inconsistent across of their apps and within Windows 10 OS, it actually makes it bit worse because we have now hard-mix of mostly MDL2, some Metro, mostly flattened AERO (not aesthetically but UI-wise), and now some element of Fluent Design. Unfortunately, this is the way Microsoft does. I'm not expecting full-on Fluent Design System, but at least start making things consistent. This Office app, for example, has rounded ribbon tabs, some have borders and Hamburger menu varies by design and behavior. Their own apps never looked consistent from larger scale to tiniest subtle details. They more cared about showing fancy things first.
  • Barely there... But nice to see nonetheless! Now for the rest of the Office apps and Mail & Calendar to get their facelifts.
  • I think MS should keep their eyes on battery backup which is decreasing after each Major&Cumulative update.
    And there is another fluent design methodology, which is looking good but converting all apps without any reason is not good idea.
  • People downvoting you aren't for jokes, and that's not a thing to be proud of it.
  • Can someone tell me why Windows Store does not show me the Word Mobile app I want when I search for "Word Mobile" or "Word"? Seems that MS does not want users to download the mobile version of Office right now.
  • I think they'll make a full fledged Office apps as UWP (like they did with OneNote) and roll it out for free (as they're already free for mobile devices).
  • It does.
  • -
  • Does anyone know when will the Office team implement ACTUAL features in Word Mobile? I mean equation editor, style editing... this fluent design mumbo-jumbo is just taking developer time away from making real progress. The Desktop Bridge version of Office will not reach Mobile because it won't have a XAML interface.
  • Is office on the same update cycle as windows itself?  meaning will the new visuals be available to the production version with creators update 2?
  • waaaahhhhh fangirl downvotes!