Appletell

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.

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iWork and MS Office are both great apps depending on your needs and wants.  MS Office is great for people who need to have compatibility with Windows users and iWork is a great addition to the rest of the Mac apps.  So the question is, which one should you get?  Each has its upsides and downsides, but how do you know which one will be right for you? Well, right off the bat there is a few things you can look at to help you make your decision.

1) Price. iWork comes in at a nice $79.00 whereas MS Office is anywhere between $149.95 and $499.95.  They both offer the same apps (text editor, presentation maker, and spreadsheet creator), but iWork is a lot cheaper.  However, they both offer free trials to see which one you like, but I imagine the price is enough to turn some away from MS Office.

2) Viruses. Cult of Mac has written a post stating that of 6 viruses in the wild for Mac OS X, 5 of them are exploited through MS Office.  As far as I’m concerned, this is enough of a reason to not go with the Microsoft product.  I don’t want my machine being more susceptible to attacks from simply editing a text file.

So when the day comes for you to decide between these two apps, which one is it going to be?  Have you already made up your mind?