It's nice that the iPhone has two great options for storing and editing Word files: Documents to Go (DTG) and Quickoffice. As one of those products is updated and temporarily takes the lead in features, it isn't long before the other is updated to match or surpass the features. The competition means better apps for us users. For example, Friday night, Quickoffice was updated to version 1.3, and there were some pretty major improvements. By the way, when I say "Quickoffice" I referring to Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite, the most full-featured version of the app, but the company also sells
Quickword if you just want to edit Word documents, Quicksheet if you
just want to edit Excel documents, and Quickoffice Files if you don't want to edit files
at all but just access them. Here are the new features in Quickoffice:
Download e-mail attachments. DTG can access your e-mail attachments if your firm uses a Microsoft Exchange Server. The DTG app essentially works as an e-mail client, connecting with your firm's Exchange server and directly downloading the attachment to your iPhone. Quickoffice takes a different approach: you forward an e-mail containing an attachment to [email protected], and then you can access those attachments on your iPhone.
Before you first use this feature, you must set it up. To do so, start the Quickoffice app and provide it with your e-mail address. The Quickoffice server will then send an e-mail to that address and once you receive the e-mail on your iPhone, you simply tap a link to validate the e-mail address. From then on, you simply forward any e-mail with an attachment to [email protected]. (To make this even easier, I recommend that you set up a new entry in your Contacts that you call something like "Quickoffice" and assign the e-mail address as [email protected]. That way, in the future you can just forward your e-mails to "Quickoffice" or whatever you called that entry.) Once you do so, the files are sent to the Quickoffice server, a server which the Quickoffice app on the iPhone can access. The next time you start Quickoffice on your iPhone, just select Attachments from the main screen (the file manager screen) and you will see a list of attachments that you have forwarded. Click any one and the attachment will be downloaded from the server to your iPhone and deleted on the server. You can store up to 50MB worth of attachments on the server. (Once you download an attachment to your iPhone, because the attachments are removed from the server, they no longer count against the 50MB file limit.)
Quickoffice points out the attachment feature works with any e-mail account. Unlike DTG, it doesn't have to be an Exchange account. This is definitely an advantage. At the same time, I have questions about security. When you use DTG, the app directly connects to your firm's Exchange server and downloads the attachment to your iPhone. No third parties are involved. But with Quickoffice, your attachment is forwarded to the Quickoffice server, where it lives until you download it to your iPhone. I have asked Quickoffice to provide me with information on the security and privacy of these attachments during the time that they live on the server and after they are downloaded to your device and Quickoffice says that they are deleted from the server. Any time that a lawyer provides confidential attorney-client or attorney work product information to a third party vendor such as a copy service or a commercial carrier, the lawyer must consider whether doing so could constitute a waiver of a privilege or could violate any specifically confidentiality requirements of a client. I don't provide legal opinions on this website so I'm not going to analyze the risk associated with your forwarding attachments to Quickoffice, but I will tell you that this is an issue that I am thinking about, and for now I will probably stick with DTG to handle attachments.
Copy and paste. Quickoffice was released long before Apple released iPhone Software 3.0, so Quickoffice originally implemented its own version of copy and paste. Quickoffice, like DTG, has now abandoned its proprietary system to adopt the standard iPhone 3.0 copy and paste system, which means that you can now copy from a Quickoffice file and paste elsewhere or vice versa. It was obvious that this change was coming, but it is still quite welcome.
Undo/redo. Quickoffice now supports the full iPhone 3.0 undo/redo functions, which includes shaking your iPhone to undo and up to 10 levels of undo.
Paragraph alignment. In addition to left, right and center alignment, you can now control the indentation of the first line of each paragraph (a feature missing from DTG). Quickoffice still does not allow you to fully justify text (both left and right margin justification). I'm not a fan of full justification in my Word documents such as briefs—long live the ragged right!—but others might miss this feature.
Find in spreadsheets. You can now find text in spreadsheets and search for next or previous occurrences.
Cell text overflow. Previously, if you had text in one cell of a spreadsheet that did not completely fit within the cell, the text would just end at the end of the cell. This was a real pain because spreadsheets designed in Excel are made to have text overflow into the next cell if that cell is empty. Quickoffice has now fixed this problem, so now cell text overflows and is correctly alligned. For example, in my February 20, 2009 review of an earlier version of Quickoffice, I showed an example of a legal interest spreadsheet that I use. Notice that in cells G19 and G20, you cannot see all of the text:
Now here is the same spreadsheet in Quickoffice 1.3, which now displays all of the text that I have in those two cells, and it also correctly understands that the text is formatted to flow to the left:
What is still missing? Quickoffice is still missing some features that are in DTG. The biggest omission for me is the ability to view and add underlining. Case names are frequently underlined in my briefs, but I don't see that in Quickoffice. [UPDATE 10/23/09: Quickoffice 1.5 now includes underlining. Finally!] DTG also includes the ability to view (although not edit) footnotes, and this is another critical omission as many of my briefs have footnotes. DTG and Quickoffice both allow you to create a bulleted list, but only DTG gives you the option to create a numbered list.
On the other hand, Quickoffice has long had support for spreadsheets, while this is still a "coming soon" feature for DTG. [UPDATE 10/1/09: Documents to Go 2.0 adds support for Excel spreadsheets. Finally!] And if you don't use Exchange for your e-mail, Quickoffice is the only option for editing attachments to an e-mail on the iPhone.
Thumbs up to Quickoffice for adding these latest improvements. I look forward to even more, both from Quickoffice and DTG, and I continue to believe that any attorney who wants the most sophisticated ability to edit and view Word documents on an iPhone will want to have the flexibility that comes with owning both apps.
Click here to get Quickoffice ($12.99): 
Click here to get Quickword ($4.99):
Click here to get Quicksheet ($4.99):
Click here to get Quickoffice Files ($0.99):
