The iPhone combines great user interface with almost infinite possibilities in application design. But, until now, there has been a relative dearth of useful office collaboration tools. Programs that are standard in every office suite—along the lines of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel—have had no real iPhone counterparts. Until today, that is.
Softalk has announced its aptly named “Spreadsheet” application for iPhone, available immediately from the App Store for a mere $7.99 (compared with $110 for a desktop version of Excel). Featuring a standard table layout with a formula bar on top, Spreadsheet allows you to format cells with everything from text and background colors to row/column size and in-cell text alignment. Cells can also be formatted to reflect the type of data they contain, with seven choices: general, number, currency, percentage, date, time or text. Spreadsheet also features in-app copy and paste functionality, allowing cells (or ranges of cells) to be copied and pasted within a worksheet. Sadly, this functionality does not extend to the entire iPhone interface.
Spreadsheet users can also take heart in the included set of over 50 functions, organized into Date/Time, General, Math, Statistical, String, and Trigonometric categories. A select listing of functions includes:
TODAY
COUNT
ABS
FACTORIAL
LOG
LOG10
MAX
MIN
ROUND
SUM
AVE
MEDIAN
MODE
A major impediment to the development of useful office apps for the iPhone is the underlying storage model; there is no proper filesystem for applications. All data created/stored by an application is done within the application itself, rather than in a separate file (in this case, a .xls workbook somewhere). This lack of file formats makes it difficult to share documents between a desktop computer app and the corresponding iPhone app. Softalk has neatly gotten around this limitation by providing the ability to e-mail a Spreadsheet document as an attachment, openable in Microsoft Office Excel 2003 or later. No word yet on when Microsoft will counter with their own version of Office apps for iPhone.
Softalk has announced its aptly named “Spreadsheet” application for iPhone, available immediately from the App Store for a mere $7.99 (compared with $110 for a desktop version of Excel). Featuring a standard table layout with a formula bar on top, Spreadsheet allows you to format cells with everything from text and background colors to row/column size and in-cell text alignment. Cells can also be formatted to reflect the type of data they contain, with seven choices: general, number, currency, percentage, date, time or text. Spreadsheet also features in-app copy and paste functionality, allowing cells (or ranges of cells) to be copied and pasted within a worksheet. Sadly, this functionality does not extend to the entire iPhone interface.
Spreadsheet users can also take heart in the included set of over 50 functions, organized into Date/Time, General, Math, Statistical, String, and Trigonometric categories. A select listing of functions includes:
A major impediment to the development of useful office apps for the iPhone is the underlying storage model; there is no proper filesystem for applications. All data created/stored by an application is done within the application itself, rather than in a separate file (in this case, a .xls workbook somewhere). This lack of file formats makes it difficult to share documents between a desktop computer app and the corresponding iPhone app. Softalk has neatly gotten around this limitation by providing the ability to e-mail a Spreadsheet document as an attachment, openable in Microsoft Office Excel 2003 or later. No word yet on when Microsoft will counter with their own version of Office apps for iPhone.
Product [Softalk Spreadsheet]
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