Quickoffice’s Cloudier Approach to iPhone Office Suites

By  |  Friday, February 12, 2010 at 8:30 am

Quickoffice–which was the first office suite for the iPhone–is now the first with a very cool feature: built-in support for Google Docs. It’s part of Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite 3.0, which was announced this week at Macworld 2010.

The new version lets you open word-processing documents and spreadsheets stored in Google Docs’ online repository, edit them, and save them back to Google Docs. And it lets you do the same for files saved at online-storage services Box.net and Dropbox. (Quickoffice already had similar support for Apple’s MobileMe service.) These cloud-based storage features are particularly useful given that Apple still doesn’t enable office suites like Quickoffice to open file attachments. (The suite does offer a workaround that requires you to forward attachments to a special address.)

I told Quickoffice my Google Docs login credentials, and it let me see all the documents I’ve created and stored there:

Medium-sized nitpick: Google Docs itself shows the files you’ve edited most recently first, and allows you to search for documents, so it’s generally very easy to find documents even if you haven’t organized them in folders. (Which I haven’t.) Quickoffice, however, lists everything in alphabetical order. You’ll be able to find your documents, but it might take more scrolling around to hunt them down.

This new version of Quickoffice requires you to sign up for an account with the company which it uses to help manage file conversions. It’s a quick process, but some customers are squawking about it in reviews at the iTunes App Store. Maybe the Quickoffice folks could help minimize unhappiness by making it clearer what they will and won’t do with your information when you sign up.

Quickoffice continues to compete with Dataviz’s mobile office suite Documents to Go–and in a perfect world, there’d be one suite that had all the best features of both products. Documents to Go has a presentation app–Quickoffice only does word processing and spreadsheets, though presentations are in the works–and built-in access to file attachments in Microsoft Exchange and Gmail accounts. But it doesn’t have Quickoffice’s useful new cloud-storage features.

Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite is a very reasonable $9.99. There’s also a $7.99 version without the new cloud features, and Quickoffice Connect, a free app that lets view and share files stored in the cloud services, but not edit them. They’re all available now at the App Store.

 
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5 Comments For This Post

  1. Jonathan Saggau Says:

    A simpler reader ($ 1.99) is gogoDocs from gogodocs.com. A Google Docs™ reader for the iPhone, gogoDocs keeps all of your documents handy by syncing your Google Docs™ account to your iPhone or iPod Touch. gogoDocs downloads documents to your iPhone while online, then lets you view them any time. Background syncing, blazing fast pdf viewer, automatic bookmarking, document filtering, document sharing, and a simple, intuitive experience make gogoDocs an essential tool for all Google Docs™ users. Oh, and it sorts documents by date and allows you to filter documents by type making it easy to find what you are looking for.

  2. robinson Says:

    I still don’t understand why anyone would want their documents, personal information, files stored in the “cloud”– aka on Google’s servers, where they can be scanned, analyzed, invaded!

    My privacy is worth much, much more than the supposed convenience of access.

    Appreciate the review. I’ve been using D2G and its synching is wicked fast.

  3. Marc Says:

    Looks like my Pocket PC did better than this back in 2001.

  4. dave Says:

    i just downloaded Office2 this past week after looking over quickoffice and it is WAY better- has the identical google docs feature set (including edit etc) with a built in “email this file” option as well, and details on the file (size, etc) – and an XLS/sheet program – and both integrate with not only google but also idisk/mobileme – take a look, it just launched so it is currently only 5 or 6 bucks and a TOTAL steal (no, i’m not shilling, i was actually looking for that exact docs feature – real time file changes – but what’s very cool about Office2 is that i can share the file via email AND i can copy it from iDisk to GoogleDocs from my iPhone! very slick)

  5. nevertell Says:

    Hello? McFly….(knocks on the side of their head) What about the ability to save the newly created document file ON the iphone itself? We need to create and save the document files directly on the iphone, not to some internet based storage. (that’s fine if you want it) Any review should mention if you can save the file to the iphone or not, it’s a basic requirement!