At the CTIA Fall trade show on Wednesday, I got a quick look at the latest state of QuickOffice, one of the two Microsoft Office-compatible suites being developed for the iPhone. It isn't quite ready yet; right now it can edit Microsoft Excel documents, but only read Microsoft Word documents.
The biggest challenge with creating an iPhone office suite, it seems, is dealing with the iPhone's wacky file system issues. Each iPhone app has its own file storage space, and the apps can't access each others' spaces. So you can't save an e-mail attachment or something from Safari into a public folder to be edited by QuickOffice, for instance.
QuickOffice tries to get around the problem with an extra app, QuickAccess. QuickAccess lets you download documents from MobileMe, Google Docs or other shared Web folders to be accessed by QuickOffice, and then to reupload your edited documents to the Web. Because QuickAccess shares a developer signature with QuickOffice, apparently the three programs can all share files.
I saw a few sample spreadsheets in QuickSheet, and yes, it was quick - you can zoom, scroll, and shrink your view using the usual iPhone gestures.
Tapping on a cell lets you edit it. QuickWord, meanwhile, showed Word documents with formatting intact; editing is coming soon, apparently. But until Apple starts letting these programs interact with e-mail, it's going to be a little awkward using documents on your iPhone. Find some more screen shots after the jump, on AppScout.
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