Very recently, Quickoffice, Inc renamed their popular business app, Quickoffice Connect™ Mobile Suite for iPad, to Quickoffice® Pro HD. As mostly everyone should already know, Quickoffice enables you to work with Microsoft® Office files on your iDevice. Yes, I realize we’re a year late reviewing Quickoffice for the iPad, but better late than never.

Review
Quickoffice® Pro HD lets you create, edit, and view Word, Excel, and PowerPoint® files on your iPad. As its title indicates, the app caters more to quick (or perhaps light) mobile usage than full functionality. Hence, you should be aware Quickoffice can’t handle everything that your desktop application is capable of. This is also true of other similar apps, to differing degrees.

Visually, Quickoffice looks great, and it’s very easy to use. Spreadsheet and document files may be created in either Microsoft Office’s 2003 or 2007 formats, while presentation files are set to the 2003 format by default. You may also create plain text files.

Text documents are presented page by page, similar to Word’s Page Layout view. You can zoom in and out of a page by pinching your fingers, but within a certain range, and the text does not get rewrapped. Currently, the text formatting options are rather limited. Only seven common fonts are offered (two more than in Documents to Go), and you can style the text in bold, italic, and underline. Superscript and subscript are unavailable, and neither may you strike out any text (these, on the other hand, are available in Documents to Go). Also, while you can choose to align your text left or right, or center it, there is no way to justify text. Furthermore, no options are given to change the line spacing (e.g. from single to double spaced).

Images may be added only within presentation files, and a number of shapes are available for your use. Once you’ve inserted your text and images, it’s simple and intuitive to resize and rotate each item. Although we’re supposed to be able to use images from our photo library, none of the pictures in my camera roll or photo albums showed up. I tried restarting my iPad 2, but it didn’t solve the problem. The other thing I was unable to do despite following all the instructions was to mount my iPad on my mac to transfer files.

You can easily open and save files within Dropbox, Google Docs, Box, MobileMe, Huddle, and SugarSync. If you need to save a file locally, do note that the save options will only show up after you’ve edited the file. Although files you open from these online storage providers are downloaded, they can’t be accessed in offline mode. It would be much more convenient if each file could be immediately downloaded into a local folder instead. A “recent files” area would be another useful feature to add in a future update.

Overall, despite a few limitations, Quickoffice will be of great help to those who need to work on the go. AirPrint has been implemented, and you may also save files as PDFs. The app should be especially beneficial to those who need to make presentations, as you can connect your iPad to an external monitor or projector and even activate a virtual laser pointer.

Recommendation
Quickoffice® Pro HD is well recommended to those who would like to work with Microsoft® Office files on their iPad. You can purchase it now from the App Store for $14.99.

Photos

Note: A promotional code was provided by the creator for use in this article.

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