David Flynn07 April 2009, 1:10 AM
Microsoft is playing coy on its plans to bring Office to the iPhone, but it’s about to be beaten to the punch by an independent iPhone app due this month...
Office for Windows, Office for Mac, Office for … iPhone? That’s where things are headed, but oh so slowly. Senior Microsoft exec Steven Elop has hinted that an iPhone version of Microsoft Office is brewing away somewhere in the Microsoft skunkworks.
Speaking at San Francisco’s Web 2.0 conference in response to a question about if iPhone users would eventually able to put Office into their pocket, Evers replied with the guarded yet teasing words “Not yet – keep watching.”
But why wait? If you’re keen to be able to create and edit Office documents on your iPhone you need only wait another few weeks for the release of
QuickOffice for the iPhone.
Due at the end of this month, QuickOffice for the iPhone lets you create and edit Word and Excel documentsJoining its QuickOffice siblings for Android, Palm, Symbian and BlackBerry devices, QuickOffice for the iPhone includes the soon-to-be-released QuickWord and the already available QuickSheet ( plus the company’s QuickOffice Files manager (which sells on its own for US$3.99).
QuickWord lets you work with documents in landscape mode to make full use of the QWERTY keypad
The price hasn’t yet been announced, but given that QuickSheet for the iPhone sells for US$12.99 we’d peg QuickWord at the same price and suggest the combo pack would sell for around US$20-$25.
Both QuickSheet and QuickWord support all the major functions of their desktop equivalents,
although you're restricted to using Microsoft's classic DOC and XLS file formats
However, QuickSheet and QuickOffice support only the ‘classic’ Office DOC and XLS formats and don’t have the ability to create or edit the newer XML-based documents.
Oddly enough, Apple appears uninterested in allowing the iPhone to do anything more than view iWork documents – and that feature was added only in the 2.0 release of the iPhone OS. But there’s always MacWorld 2010... oh, hang on,
no there’s not.