Microsoft Office for the iPhone

Those of you who have been waiting with baited breath for the promised Office application for your iPhone will soon be able to inhale sharply.

The “QuickOffice for iPhone” application was announced at this week's CTIA Wireless 2009 tradeshow and conference in Las Vegas, and promises to allow “a wide range of editing and file-management features”.

In layman’s terms, this means that soon enough you’ll be able to share and edit MS Word and MS Excel files using your phone.

This could spell a turnaround in the trend for businesspeople to lug around hefty (comparatively) laptop computers, where instead they’ll now be able to conduct simpler tasks using their mobiles.

Features that will survive the PC to iPhone migration include cut, copy, paste, formatting, bulleting and text selection on Word, and cell editing, cell resizing, maths and stats functions for Excel. Though the programmes have not been reviewed yet, developers are hopeful that they should please users who have previously been disappointed by Dataviz’ failure to fulfil their promise to release their “Documents-to-go” application.

Dataviz first spoke of the release last October, but are still unable to set a final release date yet.

Various parts of the QuickOffice programme have been release already, but they will soon be joined by QuickWord- thus completing the suite. This should be available soon at an “introductory” price of $19.99.

Users who only want Excel functions may want to look into Mariners Software’s Excel-on-iPhone app, the $9.99 Mariner Calc.