App review: Quickoffice

review by Christine Chan


Have you ever needed to work on a document for school or work while you’re on-the-go? Don’t feel like taking the laptop with you? Looking for a more portable solution? Look no further than QuickOffice on the iPhone/iPod Touch! This app puts an entire mobile office suit in the palm of your hand – no laptops required.

The app will allow you to create three different file types – text files, Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets. If you’re not familiar with these types of files, text is just basic text, while Word documents can provide rich text and formatting, while Excel spreadsheets are for entering data and keeping track of things [from my use of them].



On the main screen, you see a list of documents and spreadsheets that you currently have in the app. If you need more organization, feel free to add various folders and move whichever files you need to with the ‘Move’ icon on the bottom of the list screen.

When you create a new text file, all you can do is just type out a very basic document with a fixed font (Courier) without any color or formatting such as bold and italics. Unless you need to have a simple text document, one most likely won’t use this part of the app *too* much. The real desire is the ability to edit real documents.

Yes, everyone needs to use Word (or a similar program such as iWork) or some other office suite at some point in their lives, if not all the time. With QuickOffice, you can create new documents or edit current ones (get desktop files onto QuickOffice by WiFi, discussed a bit further down).

With the bottom toolbar, you can create rich text with font colors and background colors, formatting options like bold/italics/underline, and highlight certain parts of a document. There are even options for indenting and paragraphs, and create bulleted lists. These are just a handful of the formatting options that most will find in a full featured desktop office suite, but these are pretty much the bare-bone essentials that are mostly used. If you need to use the missing formatting options, you can simply fix that later as you download the file on the computer to edit.

The best thing that is featured in QuickOffice for Word editing is that ever-popular Word Count. Students, journalists, and whoever else need a frequent check on their words will appreciate this. There is also a Find feature, though it seems unable to do mass replacing. It will find the word(s) and highlight them with the iPhone’s markers to copy text.

With the document editor, the .txt, .doc, and the newer .docx files (1997-2008) are compatible.

When creating a new spreadsheet, you’ll be greeted with the ever-familiar cells of an Excel screen, blank for you to mess with to your heart’s content. Tap a cell and enter whatever you need in it at the top of the screen, where the blank text field is between the fx and X buttons. Alternatively, you can double tap a cell to input text. If you need a category of function, tap that fx button and it will pull up all those equational goodies that you probably are familiar with if you constantly use Excel. To clear any text in the cell, hit the X button – simple.

The toolbar in the spreadsheet editor will allow you to do text formatting, text color and background, cell borders, number format, insert/delete rows and columns, as well as the find [but not replace] feature. There’s even an easy way to Drag to Align your columns so that all text will fit, and even wrap the text so it all can appear in one cell, thought the UI doesn’t seem to be user-friendly with figuring this out. Best bet is to keep tinkering around with it till the option to merge cells or something makes itself apparent.

Some spreadsheets may need multiple sheets in the workbook. Don’t worry, QuickOffice has this covered too! Just Edit and ‘Add new worksheet,’ and you’ll be on your way!

Saving in all three formats is easy – simply tap on the ‘Back’ screen from whatever document you’re in and you’ll be prompted with the option to save or not. Make sure to look at this carefully to avoid losing your hard work and time.
The user will also have the option of adding a MobileMe iDisk account to enable easy access to any document files stored there and enable E-mail attachments to access, open, edit, and forward any email attachments within the app.

Uploading files from the computer to Quickoffice on the iPhone is quick and easy. Simply connect via Bonjour to the address the app tells you to once the device and computer are connected on the same WiFi network. From there, you can upload documents and spreadsheets, which will automatically appear on your device when Quickoffice is running. In the browser view, you can also click files to get a link to download the copy to your computer to edit. The browser way to transfer files means that there is no desktop client to install (like DocsToGo), but this also means that you will have to manually download and upload files to be able to work on them when constantly switching between a computer and the iPhone/iPod Touch.

Overall, this is a great mobile office suite which anyone that has a serious workflow should consider. No desktop client to install in order to sync (some actually prefer it this way), plenty of options in document and spreadsheet editing, and even the minimal text editor is a nice change at times, though you can’t get much real editing or fancy formatting with it. If there could be more format options such as the real desktop office suites had, the score can be better.

Quickoffice is available for $9.99 in the App Store.