Quickoffice has been on the iPhone, in one form or another, for over a year now. The company's first app, released at the end of 2008, was called MobileFiles Pro and it allowed you to view a variety of types of documents that were on your MobileMe account or that you had moved from a computer to the app, but the groundbreaking feature was the ability to edit Microsoft Excel documents. Then in April of 2009, the developer added the ability to edit Microsoft Word documents, another breakthrough development because it was the only app at the time to do so. The MobileFiles Pro app was renamed Quicksheet and the full app that could edit both Word and Excel documents was called Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite. (The company subsequently released a slimmed down version that handled Word files but not Excel files called Quickword.) In July of 2009, the developer added the ability to forward an e-mail to a special address, which would then allow you to access the attachments to the e-mail in the Quickoffice app. In October of 2009, the developer added the sorely missed ability to view and add underlining.
Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite. Quickoffice has now come out with the third generation of its app, and once again we see some name changes. The flagship app is now called Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite. It includes everything that had been in Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite, including the ability to edit Word and Excel documents and the ability to access files in your MobileMe account or someone else's public MobileMe folder, and adds the ability to access files in more online accounts, namely the ability to access Box.net, Google Docs and Dropbox files. These are many of the major "cloud storage" providers. Users who previously had Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite were automatically upgraded for free to Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite starting this past Tuesday, so be on the lookout for the upgrade if you already had Quickoffice on your iPhone.
I don't use Box.net or Dropbox so I didn't test those services, but Quickoffice has always worked well with my MobileMe account and it now seems to work just as well with my Google Docs account. This is the point in a review when I would normally post pictures from my iPhone, but to do so I would have had to redact some confidential information, so instead I'll just post these two pictures that Quickoffice provides on its website to give you a general sense of how these additional services appear in the app:
I am not an extensive user of Google Docs, but I do sometimes have people share Google Docs files with me. It is very handy to now have the ability to access those files on the iPhone from within an app that I already know and enjoy using.
As for the other features of Quickoffice, such as the ability to edit Word and Excel documents, these features were addressed in my prior reviews so I will just refer you there: 2/20/09, 4/22/09, 5/5/09, 7/20/09, 8/4/09. One big change since I wrote those reviews is, as noted above, the app now handles underlining in Word documents.
Five apps. With this update, Quickoffice is now offering five different apps for the iPhone:
- Quickoffice Connect — free — this app it includes all of the cloud services now available in the flagship product, but you can only view files, not edit them.
- Quicksheet — $8.99 — adds the ability to edit Excel documents. The current version can still only access MobileMe files, so it lacks the brand new ability to access Google Docs, Box.net and Dropbox, although it wouldn't surprise me to see this added soon.
- Quickword — $8.99 — just like Quicksheet except that this one edits Word documents instead of Excel documents
- Quickoffice Mobile Suite — $7.99 — edits both Word and Excel documents, but doesn't include the ability to access remote cloud service providers, not even MobileMe. Thus, this app is sort of like the old version of Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite with the MobileMe support removed for $2 less.
- Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite — $9.99 — the new flagship product as described above
Quickoffice says that the $9.99 price for Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite is a "limited-time introductory price" and that the full price will be $19.99. But you should know that they said the same thing about Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite in 2009 and I don't believe that I ever saw the company increase the price above $9.99. The only price change I saw occurred during sales. For example, last month the price dropped to $7.99 for a short time, and on "Cyber Monday" in 2009 the price dropped to only $6.99. I suspect that as long as DataViz is selling Documents to Go for $9.99, Quickoffice will keep its top app at $9.99 as well. (Note, however, that DataViz also sells Documents to Go Premium for $14.99.)
Documents to Go. It is impossible to discuss Quickoffice without also discussing Documents to Go from DataViz (and vice versa) because they are the two competitors in this field. Quickoffice was first with the ability to edit Excel files (in late 2008) and the ability to edit Word files (in April of 2009), but Documents to Go came to the iPhone with Word editing features in June of 2009 and added Excel editing features in October of 2009. Because they offer many of the same features, people often ask me which is the better one to buy. [Disclosure: I purchased my copy of Documents to Go, but I received a free review copy of Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite, which like all other copies was upgraded this week for free to Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite.] I wrote an extensive comparison of the two apps in August of 2009, but both apps have been updated since then. For example, at the very end of 2009, Documents to Go added the ability to edit and create PowerPoint presentations. Some of my previous discussions of Documents to Go are here: 6/22/09, 6/25/09, 8/4/09, 8/17/09, 12/31/09.
As it stands now, if you use one of the four cloud services that Quickoffice now supports, then Quickoffice may be the better app for you. Documents to Go doesn't include the ability to access any of those services. [UPDATE 4/24/10: Documents to Go version 3.2 now supports Google Docs, Dropbox and Box.net]
On the other hand, if you use Microsoft Exchange (Outlook on your PC) or Gmail for your e-mail, then you might prefer Documents to Go Premium (which costs $5 more than regular version of Documents to Go) because it has the ability to directly access attachments to e-mails. I love that feature. Quickoffice includes a workaround noted above — you forward an e-mail with an attachment to a special Quickoffice address, which then makes the attachment available on your iPhone — but I find it more convenient to access attachments directly. Also, and importantly for many attorneys, Quickoffice still lacks the ability to view or edit footnotes in Word documents, whereas Documents to Go handles footnotes very well. Finally, Documents to Go does a much better job of viewing PDF files, including enhanced options for jumping to different pages in a long document such as the ability to see small thumbnails of different pages and the ability to jump to a specific page number.
The problem with trying to compare Quickoffice to Documents to Go is that both apps are frequently improved, often leapfrogging over each other in features. For example, when I wrote my extensive comparison in August of 2009, Documents to Go couldn't edit Excel files so that was a major advantage of Quickoffice. Now, both apps can do this. As of today, only Documents to Go can edit PowerPoint files, but Quickoffice says that PowerPoint editing will be added as a free update at some point this year. I'm sure we will see many new features added to both apps over the course of this year.
In my mind, both apps are cheap enough and are so valuable that you might as well just get them both. That way, whenever new features are added to either app, you will always have the ability to take advantage of the latest features. But whether you get both apps or just choose one, these apps vastly improve your ability to access and view Word and Excel files on your iPhone, plus they add the ability to edit these files. And let me underscore one of those points; even if you never plan to edit a Word or Excel document and just want to view those files, both apps do a much better job than the iPhone can on its own. For example, Apple gives every iPhone the ability to view Word files, but the text is often so small that you need to zoom in to read the words, and then you need to use your finger to scroll back and forth to read the beginning and end of a line. In Quickoffice and Documents to Go, you can pinch to zoom the text size and the document continues to fill the screen without making you scroll back and forth. Reading a brief, Memorandum, etc. on the iPhone is infinitely better with either of these apps.
Quickoffice and Documents to Go are both great iPhone apps. It is wonderful to see these latest improvements to Quickoffice, and I look forward to more improvements to both apps in 2010. If you are a lawyer or other professional with a need to use an iPhone as a mobile office, even if it just an occasional need, these apps are great.
Click here for Quickoffice Connect (free): 
Click here for Quicksheet ($8.99):
Click here for Quickword ($8.99):
Click here for Quickoffice Mobile Suite ($7.99):
Click here for Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite ($9.99):
Click here for Documents to Go ($9.99):
Click here for Documents to Go Premium ($14.99):
