QuickOffice Connect Mobile Suite Review: Pocket Productivity Power

App Name:	QuickOffice Connect Mobile Suite
Platforms:	iPhone, iPod Touch
Publisher(s):	QuickOffice, Inc.
Genre(s):	productivity
Release Date:	April 20, 2010 (version reviewed)

For those seeking a robust productivity platform on their iPhone or iPod Touch, there are several options. One worth your time is QuickOffice Connect Mobile Suite, the app that puts the power of productivity in the palm of your hand.

QuickOffice offers a fully functional collection of productivity apps. The two central apps are Quickword, a word processing app, and Quicksheet, a spreadsheet app. Both programs work in, and are fully compatible with, Microsoft Word formatted files. QuickOffice Connect Mobile Suite can also read and display (but not edit) PowerPoint and .PDF files, and its Connect feature means that QuickOffice can load and save files to remote servers, including popular cloud platforms.

The app most users will want is Quickword. The app is excellent as a functional document creator. It features seven standard fonts (such as Times New Roman, Arial, and Helvetica) with scalable font size; basic font formatting options like bold, italics, and text color; and paragraph formatting options like centering, indents, and bullet lists. It has, in other words, a lot of the basic things you want to do with text documents on a regular basis. Nothing fancy, but then, on the go, I’m not usually trying to create art.

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I’ve drafted and/or edited more than a few documents with Quickword … including the first draft of this review. Never have I had a problem with creating, editing, or saving files. The program just works, every time. It’s reliable and usable.

Quickword lacks a bit in formatting options, for sure. It also really struggles with more than the most basic formatting features of a Word 2007 document. Trying to edit any document with images, for example, means that the image becomes immovable and unalterable in-app, and any advanced formatting it carries, like text wrapping, are suppressed in-app.Fortunately, in my tests with it, those features were merely suppressed, not removed, and they returned when I brought the file back into Word 2007 even if I’d made other changes and re-saved the file in QuickOffice.

Quicksheet is very much like its companion. It does a good job of providing a basic spreadsheet tool with basic spreadsheet functions.  You can create and format a spreadsheet with excellent functionality and the same formatting options available in Quickword. One feature that was noticibly lacking was the ability to freeze columns or rows; this seems an odd omission, as it would often be a welcome feature on iPhone’s tiny screen.

Those more accustomed to a lot of Microsoft Excel’s automatic features, especially those relating to formulas, will struggle a bit here. Quicksheet requires you to enter most functions manually (though it will provide you with the formula template). And like Quickword, the fancier formatting options of Excel spreadsheets won’t carry over (like any formatting created with Excel 2007’s “Format as Table” command). But in terms of allowing you to carry along and quickly enter data into a functioning, productive worksheet. Quicksheet gets the job done.

Even outside of QuickOffice’s two apps, there’s plenty of good to be had. For one thing is the “Connect” part of the suite, the one that lets you connect QuickOffice directly to Google Docs, Dropbox, MobileMe, MobileMe iDisk, and Box.net.  For each of these popular services, you can not only log in and view files, but also pull any document or spreadsheet directly into the app, edit it within the app, and then save it right back to the service. This level of cloud service is something that iPhone lacks natively, and it’s wonderful to have a third party app providing such a robust version.

You can also transfer files wirelessly directly from QuickOffice. The app provides you with an IP address; just point your favorite desktop browser at it and you can pull any locally stored file from the app. This is another one of those excellent little features that one wishes were native to the iPhone itself.

The background of this slide was NOT a bunch of pixellated dots.

Now, I won’t go so far as to say that QuickOffice is perfect. Its lack of solid PowerPoint support, for example, is currently a mark against it. While QuickOffice can read PowerPoint files, its display tends to have trouble with more than the most basic formatting. This was an issue with Word and Excel files too; but it’s especially important here because formatting is so often more important to a PowerPoint than it is to a document. In some instances, this problem even made slides hard to read (see image). In addition, the slides scroll like a continuous page, not in slide-at-a-time swipes (which would make more sense).  I also do wish that both Quickword and Quicksheet offered a little more robustness in their editing and formatting options. (Freeze panes, I’m looking at you!).

No one will ever say that editing documents and spreadsheets on the iPhone is the most efficient way to get things done. But when you have to be productive on the go, you want something that not only does what you need it to do, but does it without problems. QuickOffice with MobileConnect does that, and does it well.

Our score: 4 out of 5 stars.

QuickOffice Connect Mobile Suite is currently available for $9.99 in the App Store (App Store Link). Or, for $7.99, you can buy QuickOffice Mobile Suite without the Connect features (no Google Docs or other cloud options); but why wouldn’t you want Connect?

About the Author

Writer@Large Brian P. Hudson is an educator and freelance writer currently living in Dearborn, MI.

 

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