Review: MobileFiles Pro - transfer files, edit Excel files on the iPhone

[UPDATE 4/22/09:  MobileFiles Pro was renamed and is now called Quicksheet.  The developer has also introduced Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite, which offers all of the functions of Quicksheet / MobileFiles Pro plus the ability to edit Microsoft Word documents.  Click here for my review of Quickoffice, which also serves as an update to the rest of this review.]

Earlier this week, I mentioned that I am looking forward to the release of DataViz's Documents to Go on the iPhone.  But there is another product recently released for the iPhone that includes many of the features that Documents to Go is supposed to have.  MobileFiles Pro by Quickoffice is an impressive, powerful and professional iPhone app.  This $9.99 app brings includes sophisticated file management tools that allow you to upload, view, edit (for Excel files), and send files on your iPhone.  (And for only, $3.99, MobileFiles 2.0 gives you the same features except for editing Excel files.)

Uploading files to the iPhone.  The app gives you three ways to transfer a file to the iPhone.  First, if you use Apple's MobileMe service, MobileFiles Pro can access any files in your iDisk.  Second, if your iPhone is on the same WiFi network as your home computer, you simply tap the WiFi Desktop Connection button on the home screen and then type an address given to you by the app into your browser and you will see a nice webpage displaying all files on the iPhone along with an Upload button that allows you to add more files:

 

Note that if you are using the Safari web browser on a Mac or PC, it is even easier to use the WiFi Desktop Connect function.  First, make sure that in your Safari Preferences, in the tab for Bookmarks, you have a checkmark next to "Include Bonjour" in either your Bookmarks Bar or your Bookmarks Menu.  Once you have confirmed that it set correctly, just start up WiFi Connect in MobileFiles Pro, and then instead of having to type in any IP address on your computer, just go to the Bonjour menu in Safari and select the entry for "MobileFiles - iPhone."

I've previously reviewed another app called Datacase that allows you to transfer files to your iPhone.  Datacase allows you to connect to your iPhone using a web browser, but MobileFiles Pro does a far better job.  Datacase also allows you to mount your iPhone like an external drive on a Mac or PC, something that MobileFiles Pro does not do.  But Datacase does not let you use iDisk.

There is also a third way to get a file to MobileFiles Pro, and I discuss it below in my discussion of sending a file.

Viewing Files.  Once your files are on the device, you can see a list of what files you have, create folders, move files, etc. 

Tap on a filename to view a file.  The app can view images, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, iWork Pages, Numbers and Keynote documents, PDF files, web pages, web archives, text and audio files.  (The app does not support RTF files.)  You can tap once when viewing a document to view it full screen or tap again to see a toolbar superimposed on the document, on which you can tap to go back to your list of documents or tap the folder icon for options on saving or sending the file:

   

Editing Files.  What sets this app apart from other document storage and viewing apps is that you can actually edit Microsoft Excel 2003 files, with over 125 features supported.  On the spreadsheets that I tested, this feature worked well.  Here are some screen shots from a spreadsheet that I use to calculate legal interest.  One minor flaw that I noticed is that if you have text set in Excel to display over multiple cells, the text only displays within the first cell in MobileFiles Pro.  For example, you can see below in cell G20 that I wanted to display "Grand Total" stretched across two cells, but only the word "Grand" is displayed on the first cell.  But this is just a minor cosmetic annoyance, and it is nice to be able to enter and edit numbers, formulas, add and delete rows, resize columns, etc. -- a big step up from apps like Mail that handle Excel files but only show a picture of a spreadsheet, almost as if you had printed it out, without the ability to change anything.

   

You can pinch to zoom in or out, plus if you turn the iPhone, the spreadsheet turns and removes all toolbars so you can see a lot more of the spreadsheet:

Although the current version of this app edits Excel files, a company representative told me that they are working on adding the ability to edit Word files.  Quickoffice (like DataViz) writes products for lots of different smartphones including Palm, Symbian, Blackberry and Android, and many of those products have document editing features, so the company clearly knows what it is doing in this area.

Sending Files. You have several options for getting a file from your iPhone to another location.  First, as noted above, you can use a web browser to connect to your iPhone and download any file from the iPhone to any computer.  Second, the app can upload to your iDisk, and then you can later download from your iDisk to a Mac or PC. 

Third, the app allows you to send any file as an attachment to an e-mail.  The way it does this is actually pretty ingenious.  You can choose to send any file that MobileFiles Pro has on your iPhone as an attachment to an e-mail, and when the app sends the e-mail there are actually two files attached -- the file itself, and a small little HTML file.  The recipient of the e-mail can then tap on that HTML file and will see a screen on which the recipient can tap the top button to copy the file to MobileFiles Pro, or the bottom button to learn more about MobileFiles Pro:

   

It is interesting that Quickoffice found a way to work around Apple's normal "sandbox" restrictions and get a document out of your e-mail and into a third party app.  Normally, third party apps cannot get access to e-mails in the Mail program, let alone the attachments to those e-mails.  Quickoffice gets points here for creativity; their solution is a little awkward, but it works, and it isn't Quickoffice's fault that Apple is forcing companies to come up with workarounds like this.  Note that you can turn this function off and only send the file if you are e-mailing someone who you know doesn't have MobileFiles Pro or MobileFiles 2.0 (or, for that matter, an iPhone).

MobileFiles and MobileFiles 2.0.  If you want to get a feel for MobileFiles Pro without spending $10, you can download a free program by Quickoffice called MobileFiles.  It lets you download files from an iDisk, but not upload files, nor can you use a web browser on a computer to transfer files over WiFi to and from the iPhone.  It handles Microsoft Office files and image files, but not iWork files, plus it lacks the sophisticated file organization features.  It lacks the e-mail functions described above.  And it doesn't allow the editing of spreadsheets.  I love it when app developers give you a way to try a limited version of an app for free before you buy the full version, and thus I think it was a great idea for Quickoffice to do this.  (And if all you need is a way to view your iDisk files on the iPhone, then MobileFiles is a great little app.)

Quickoffice also sells MobileFiles 2.0.  It costs $3.99, and it looks to me like it has every feature in MobileFiles Pro except for the editing of Excel files. [UPDATE on 2/25/09:  According to a recent Macworld review, MobileFiles 2.0 has all of the features of MobileFiles Pro except for (1) editing of Excel files, (2) ability to view iWork documents and (3) ability to protect access to the app with a four-digit password.]

Conclusion.  MobileFiles Pro is a wonderful app, and it has now become my preferred app for storing files on my iPhone.  The ability to edit Excel files is nice, and while I don't think that I will use that feature very often, I like having it there for when I need it.  What really impresses me about this app is the very clean layout and design and the multiple and easy ways to get files to and from the app.  If and when Quickoffice adds the ability to edit Word docs, then this will really be a sophisticated app.  At $9.99 it is a little on the expensive side for an iPhone app, but I think it is worth it for what it does.  Plus, if you don't need to edit Excel files, MobileFiles 2.0 is a great value at only $3.99.

Click here for MobileFiles (free): 

Click here for MobileFiles 2.0 ($3.99): 

Click here for MobileFiles Pro ($9.99): 

Comments

[Mark A. Cowan]

Excellent post. I've used MobileFiles Pro for several months now and was wondering if it is the best file-storing app available. It appears to be. It's nice to have mobile access to my iDisk.

[Casey]

Thanks for your very helpful review. Since you have been getting info from Quickoffice reps, could you elaborate about spreadsheet synchronization?

[JEFF: I am not aware of "synchronization" features per se. Instead, my experience has just been with sending a spreadsheet from my computer to my iPhone and then using the spreadsheet on my iPhone, which works great.]

You mentioned that you have the ability to edit Microsoft Excel 2003 files in the iPhone, but not Excel files from any other edition of Excel. Did you need to purchase a separate copy of Excel 2003? Or are you saving your spreadsheets from a later edition of Excel, into the Excel 2003 format? (I recall that Excel for Windows offered options to save into earlier editions' formats.)

[JEFF: My law office uses Excel 2003 for Windows so I have not had to convert any files to an earlier version, although I would presume that works fine. I have sent Excel 2003 spreadsheets from my PC at work to my Mac at home, and then used my Mac to transfer the spreadsheet to my iPhone, and that works fine.]

Do you think that it might be possible to reboot one's Mac computer into Windows, and sync with a copy of Microsoft Office Excel for Windows? (Or alternatively, sync the iPhone directly to a PC?) [JEFF: Yes, I imagine that this would work fine, but I haven't done it myself.] I ask, because the current edition of Microsoft Office for the Mac computer does not have the visual basic macro language. This is a significant drawback for me, since I have written a lot of macros. [JEFF: Agreed, and I am happy that Microsoft has announced that the next version of Office for Mac will once again be able to handle macros.]

I bring this whole matter up, because for many years I had a very productive setup. I used Microsoft Office97 on a Windows 98 netbook, syncing to a Palm Pilot running Quicksheet. Further the Palm Pilot was a Handspring model with a Symbol springboard module that could read barcodes, as a keyboard wedge, directly into spreadsheets. Unfortunately, that hardware has worn out, and I can find no replacements.

[Casey]

Thanks for your quick posting, with your comments.

You have heard that Microsoft has announced that the next version of Office for Mac will once again be able to handle macros, with visual basic? ...or with some other macro language? Is there a web site that discusses this? I am searching, but can't find anything.

Do you think that this lack of visual basic is holding up the ability to synch editable spreadsheets between an iPhone and the latest version of MS Office for the Mac? I have signed up for the Apple store "one-to-one" training. The instructors have searched their sources, but tell me they can't find any clear answers.

Open Office (OO) might be an alternative. OO claims to have a Microsoft compatible visual basic macro language. But OO visual basic might not be able to "shake hands" and do the synchronization with the iPhone. As I recall, in Microsoft Office 97, Quicksheet installed a bunch of visual basic code in a password protected and hidden spreadsheet file. That file was probably closely tailored to work with Microsoft visual basic.

"Synchronization" is just the generic term for being able to make changes to a file at one computer, and automatically transfer the changes to other computers. In the simplest but least effective strategy, synchronization could be at the file level, in which case only the latest file is sent to all computers, and some changes might be lost, if made by other people, in older file copies, on other computers. More complex synching will save all changes down to the record and field level, as in a data base, such as a telephone and address listing. In that case, synching might make duplicate records appear, since the software would not be able to determine what data should be saved, and what should be discarded. Consequently, a human operator might need to resolve the conflicts, to clean out the duplicate records.

Casey

[Jeff Richardson]

Casey, I don't know the answers to all of your questions, but here is a link to a Macworld article on Visual Basic being in the next version of Office for Mac: http://www.macworld.com/article/133393/2008/05/vba.html

[Casey]

Thanks very much, Jeff, for that link to MacWorld. The MacWorld journalists provide information and links that give me more of an idea of where this Mac computer OS X and iPhone development is heading.

Casey