Quickoffice review

Quickoffice allows you to create, edit and view Microsoft Word and Excel formatted documents on an iPhone. It also lets you view – but not edit – a wide range of other formats, including PDF, Pages and Keynote files.

As a word processor, Quickoffice isn’t as feature-rich as its main competitor, Documents To Go. It includes basic character and paragraph formatting like bold, italics, and justification, but there’s no word count, or find and replace, for example. Lists are limited to bullets, with no option for numbering – although if you’re editing a numbered list which has been created using a desktop word processor, that will work. There’s also no support for Word 2007 documents, although the company is working on it.

But what Quickoffice lacks as a word processor, it more than makes up for with a plethora of other features, particularly around accessing documents elsewhere.

Excel support

The first, and most obvious feature is that you can create and edit Excel-compatible spreadsheets. For many people, this alone will be worth the money and the good news is that the range of formulae and functions supported by Quickoffice is very good indeed. You won’t be disappointed with its capabilities. The iPhone is never really going to be a hardcore spreadsheet machine, but given the limitations of the hardware Quickoffice does an excellent job.

The second area that Quickoffice shines is its support for transferring files to and from the iPhone. For MobileMe subscribers, there’s support for accessing files on your iDisk, including moving documents from there to the iPhone and vice versa. This doesn’t have to be your iDisk – it allows you to access anyone’s public folder, which can be handy if you want to drop a document in for review by someone else.

Simple file transfer

Secondly, you can easily transfer documents to and from the iPhone without the need for a desktop client via WiFi. This works in one of two ways. Once set up on the phone, you’ll be given an IP address. Type this into a browser, and you’ll be able to access all your files on the phone via a simple web interface. Or, if you prefer, you can mount the iPhone as a drive on a Mac or PC – on the Mac, by selecting Go -> Connect to Server and typing in the IP address. Once mounted, you can drag and drop files to and from the iPhone as if it were a regular drive.

But what if you receive a file as an attachment on your iPhone? Because of the way that Apple has “sandboxed” applications on the phone, there are only limited opportunities for applications to access each other’s data. So, for example, other apps can’t access attachments received in Mail.

Quickoffice gets around this in a clever way. Effectively, you can forward any email with an attachment to a special Quickoffice email address. This address can be checked from within the Quickoffice application, and any attachments you’ve forwarded will appear there. It’s a really simple system, and it works perfectly.

Overall, Quickoffice is a different kind of product from Documents To Go, which is the application it will get compared to most often. If you’re looking for the broadest possible range of word processing features, Documents To Go is the better product. However, if you need spreadsheet support now, Quickoffice is the only game in town. And if being able to get documents to and from the desktop to the iPhone in the widest number of most flexible ways is important to you, Quickoffice is the better option.