In my last post I wrote about the need to work on PowerPoint files as being one of the few things dragging me back to a laptop or rather than being able to work wholly on a tablet. How spoiled have we become? I remember what a breakthrough it was when I got my first laptop (a Macintosh PowerBook Duo 230) and was actually able to carry it with me and do work (or screw around) on my train ride. Anyway, I want to move everything onto my tablet and the cloud, and I’m not going to let PowerPoint stop me.
Viewing PowerPoint is not an issue, as there are many ways to do that, Goodreader being my favorite. The challenge is making simple edits or drafting a few rough pages. As I mentioned, you can use SkyDrive’s web apps, but it’s limited and you have to have an Internet connection.
Then I ran across Quickoffice Pro HD. I believe I found it on some road warrior website, and that the review said you pretty much could work on any MS Office file. Well, I’ve tried it and you can – and I’m now a convert!
I created a sample PowerPoint, Word, and Excel file and put the same three files in Dropbox, SkyDrive, and Google Drive. Then I plunked down $19.99 for Quickoffice. I tried working on the files from each of the cloud file handling programs in Quickoffice. The results were very impressive.
The PowerPoint tools in Quickoffice are quite good. They are not quite what you’re used to, but are well suited to the iPad. Some seem better than the desktop versions – like the formatting tools for text, color, and alignment. It takes a little getting used to, but the benefit is leaving your laptop behind. I’ve been able to make pretty significant edits, add new pages, and upload it back to my laptop where everything worked perfectly.
Excel and Word work similarly well. I don’t use Excel a lot on the iPad and there is a learning curve both in Quickoffice and Apple’s Numbers, but I can see that once you got it down, you could be pretty quick. For writing in text, you don’t really need Quickoffice, though it could clearly be a help if you are stuck with Word files.
It was something of a relief to see the that the cloud file services integrate seamlessly with Quickoffice. Working with Google Drive or Dropbox is a snap – that files are just there. So, from whatever other computer you’re working on, you can just save the files to a directory on one of those services, and like magic they will be there to work on. All the main cloud services are there – except SkyDrive. Now why would that be? Oh, it’s Microsoft and they don’t offer Office on the iPad, so they probably don’t like this app. If they priced Office at $50 on the iPad, how many billions of dollars would they have made over the last few years? Duh.
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