Google just announced that it has launched a free version of the Quickoffice for iPad app for all of its Apps for Business customers. The app lets you view, edit and create Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files (’97 – ’10) and uses Google Drive to store files in the cloud. Android and iPad versions, Google says, “are on the way.”
Google acquired Quickoffice, a company best known for its Microsoft Office-compatible mobile productivity suite, earlier this year and it quickly started to put some of the company’s knowledge to work for Google Apps users. Google Docs, Sheets and Slides now use Quickoffice’s conversion technology to convert Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. This new system will, Google says, retain a lot of information that was previously lost in the conversion process, including charts, pivot tables and other Office features.
As Google notes today, “converting old files to Google Docs, Sheets and Slides is the easiest way to share and work together, but perhaps not everyone you work with has gone Google yet. To complement what you can do with Google documents, we’re also making it easier for you to make quick edits to Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files without conversion.”
Using the new Quickoffice app with Google Drive is somewhat of a compromise then, as it doesn’t really use Google Docs, but does bring files into the Google cloud.
It’s worth noting that the regular Quickoffice Pro HD app continues to be available in the App Store, too, and still costs $7.99.
It’s worth noting that earlier today, Quickoffice competitor CloudOn also launched the latest version of its app for editing Office documents on mobile devices. Unlike Google, though, CloudOn is already available on the iPhone, as well as on the iPad and Android tablets and it also supports Google Drive, in addition to Dropbox, Box and Microsoft’s Skydrive.
