Manage Windows Phone Documents on Windows 8 PC

Windows Phone App for Windows 8 has been updated to support document management. This means when you plugin in your phone the update application will display a list of documents that’s available in your Windows Phone and good news is that it displays all kind of Office documents Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Now, not only you can view the documents but you can also add documents from your PC to phone. It would be saved in the phone memory. That said, the documents that are listed in the windows application are only picked up from phone and not email attachments.

What is the exact difference ? If you have used Office App on Windows Phone, there are four sections. Phone, Email, Skydrive and Office 365. Any document which you have opened from an email is actually listed in the Email section but is not saved to your phone. This also means you cannot use it offline. To save it to phone you will have to open the document first and then choose to save to phone.

When you select Docs section in the application, you would see an expanded version of the same which lets you view the document name  (missing in the previous screen) and filter files by type. There is also others section for non office documents.

You can select multiple files and save it to PC or Delete them directly.

Also, these documents in the phone is available in Phone > Documents when you connect your phone to your computer and explore it using Windows File Explorer.

What else is new apart from this? A big Add to Phone Tile in the app. When you click or tap on it, it lets you choose a type of file you want to add i.e. Photos, Music, Playlist, Video, Ringtone and Docs. I am guessing that a predefined filter might be added when you choose so. This is typically useful for Windows RT user or if you are using touch based interface to upload files.