The reason I suspect this news might not excite some is that the iPad currently has a number of very good Office-compatible document editing options from third-party developers. There’s QuickOffice, for instance, and Documents to Go. Both offer Word, PowerPoint and Excel file editing, creation and exporting abilities, and both perform well, coming from developers with a long history of doing document editing on mobile platforms. Then there’s Apple’s own iWork suite for iPad, which is also capable of handling Microsoft files via import.

A Microsoft solution would have the advantage of working natively with Office files in the way the company that created them intended, however. That would mean no minor formatting oddities to occasionally iron out when you shift back to Office, and maybe even tight, wireless integration with Office on the Mac or PC, as well as Office 365 on the web.

The Daily says the cost for official Office iPad apps would be somewhere around the $10 mark Apple currently charges for its iWork titles, which would be a refreshing change from the often high price tags found on its desktop offerings. But for me at least, an official Office app would have to be a lot better than the competition in terms of its mobile interface before I’d be willing to drop the third-party solutions. What about you?

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You’ve probably had the service randomly go offline at a really inconvenient time, seen general sluggishness or noticed the clunky and not-very-pretty interface. A quick unscientific internal poll brought these issues to our attention:

• Mishandles formatting when importing documents or data
• Complex spreadsheets load very slowly
• Google’s navigation bar, title and menu bar in Spreadsheets overwhelm the viewing pane, taking up a third of the page in some browsers
• No offline editing
• Doesn’t handle Powerpoint imports well
• Underpowered features in Spreadsheets: formulas, functions woefully limited compared to Excel
• Unreliable sharing feature

Google is a search and advertising company at heart. So it’s not a huge surprise that the company doesn’t intuitively know how to build productivity software and online collaboration tools. But the convenience and integration into other widely used Google products is unavoidable — so it’s not a service that’s going away any time soon.

This is why we want to see it improve. At GigaOM, we see issues like these as opportunities for innovation, so we invite you, readers, to weigh in: If you use the service, what problems have you encountered? And most importantly, how would you improve Google’s extremely-handy-but-could-be-so-much-better productivity tools?

Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

To learn more about the future of online collaboration tools, join us next month at our Network conference in San Francisco.

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The Visioneer Mobility is a sheet-fed scanner that runs on battery power and recharges via USB. The scans are stored on an SD card, and can be transferred to the iPad using the Camera Connection kit or via a Eye-Fi card and iOS companion application. Each charge scans about 300 pages either in color .jpg or your choice of color or black and white PDF. Business cards, documents and pictures all scan easily. Occasionally, a document would get stuck, but the device has a release lever to prevent damage, a slick feature lacking in most sheet-fed scanners.

The device retails for $199 and includes the scanner, a carrying case, charger, and a 2 GB SD card. Although it only ships with OCR solutions for Windows, third-party Mac software such as PDFpenpro by Smile easily converted the files to an editable format. It’s a bit larger and heavier than the other scanners I reviewed in my earlier post, but that’s understandable given that this also packs a hefty battery.

With a few months of use, I’ve really fallen in love with this scanner, and enjoy how much closer it allows me to come to a truly post-PC mobile computing experience. With more and more people replacing their traditional laptops with Android and iOS devices, as well as ultra-light laptops like the Macbook Air, expect to see the Mobility and other similar devices become even better and more numerous.

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If all you want is iWork files primarily on your iPad, no need to look beyond the iWork Suite for the iPad. However, iPhone users have been working with their spreadsheets, documents, and presentations in the cloud for a while with the iPhone versions of Documents To Go and Quickoffice and got used to not being locked into the iWork file format. Now that the iPad versions of these apps are finally out, which one is right for you? Let’s review the features first.

Documents To Go

Documents to Go for the iPhone was recently updated to support the iPad. Previous owners merely need to update and have full functionality on both devices. Two versions exist: Documents To Go and Documents To Go Premium. The Premium version adds support for cloud computing as well as presentations.

To sync with your computer, Documents To Go provides a desktop application for Windows and Mac that allows you to transfer files to and from your iPad over your Wi-Fi network without actually having to connect your computer to iTunes. The premium cloud support includes Google, MobileMe, Dropbox, Box.net and SugarSync. While you can use multiple cloud accounts, you cannot customize the names.

Quickoffice HD

Unlike Documents To Go, this is a separate iPad app. Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite for iPad is focused exclusively on the cloud, but does allow uploading files to your iPad via a web interface. Access to files on Google, MobileMe, Dropbox, and Box.net are all included. Unlike Documents To Go, SugarSync support is not included. Quickoffice has support for password protection as well as customizing the cloud account names.

Feature Comparisons

Both programs access files from the cloud and are integrated with the Dropbox iPad app to allow direct transfer of files to either Documents To Go or Quickoffice. However, Quickoffice does a more fluid job of accessing the cloud by connecting automatically in the background and quickly giving you access. Documents To Go, on the other hand, requires you to manually sync, refreshing your cloud file listing in the foreground and preventing you from doing anything else while the sync is underway. Additionally, it didn’t respect Google’s hidden documents so I literally had to scroll through hundreds of hidden files. At least Documents To Go remembered recent files making subsequent visits to the app slightly less painful.

Editing and navigating files in Quickoffice seemed more like a desktop app. For example, spreadsheets retained page tabs at the bottom in Quickoffice while in Documents To Go I had to access the toolbar at the bottom and then choose which tab to activate. PDFs in Documents To Go do not allow scrolling in the document; you have to manually turn each page. Documents To Go also had a cryptic and unintuitive toolbar at the bottom (see example below).

Of the two programs, Documents To Go did do a better job of retaining the file formatting of the original document. Neither program did a 100 percent perfect job of retaining all formatting, though. Slight errors regarding font styles and sizing as well as spacing developed. I consider these problems minor since I see the primarily goal of editing on your iPad to be data entry and manipulation, not the look and feel of the document.

Verdict

For value, Documents To Go is an ideal choice. You can have access to your files on the iPhone and iPad with just one app. You can upgrade within the app to the Premium version for an extra $5 to get the presentation and cloud access. Users of SugarSync will have to choose this app if they want access via their iPad.

For most iPad users, Quickoffice is the better choice. Easy-to-use cloud support and quick loading of your files allows for fast editing while Documents To Go painfully makes you wait to sync back and forth. Be prepared for some quirkiness in formatting going back and forth between other apps, but otherwise you’ll have a user experience nearly identical to your desktop or web-based applications for spreadsheets, presentations and word processing.

And, yes, this article was written in both Documents to Go and Quickoffice on my iPad. I ultimately finished it with Quickoffice.

What’s your iPad office suite of choice?

Contract Templates and Wizards

The hardest part in getting contracts in place is the drafting of the agreement itself. Unless you already have a lawyer who has created your documents for you, finding the best template can take a lot of time and effort. No matter how good a contract template is, it’s rare to find one that perfectly suits your situation. The good news is that there are some useful resources that can do this for you at the fraction of a cost of hiring a lawyer. Do-it-yourself solutions such as FastDue and RocketLawyer are good places to start, and we’ve covered both of these in the past.

RocketLawyer has a collection of business legal forms ranging from consulting agreements to articles of incorporation. You fill out a simple questionnaire and a document is customized based on your answers. Other features include e-signature and the ability to collaborate on documents. Google Docs users can also use free RocketLawyer templates, but you’ll have to customize them yourself. If you want to know more about RocketLawyer, start by reading Imran’s review.

FastDue also provides templates for contracts and agreements, although not as many as RocketLawyer. One advantage, though, is the variety of forms on offer, including past due notices, invoices, expense reports, and receipts. The forms also include interactive messaging, allowing your clients and colleagues to make comments directly on the document itself.  The free service offered is enough for a freelance contractor, but you can sign up for the premium service if you want something more robust.  Thursday covered FastDue’s services in a previous article if you want to learn more.

Sending and Signing

Once you have your contract ready, it’s just a matter of sending it and having it signed. Some contract creation wizards offer free e-signature functionality as part of the service, but there are plenty of other e-signature apps. Here are some of them:

• EchoSign. There are two ways to sign a document via EchoSign. Users can simply type in their initials or, if they prefer an “old school” analog approach, they can print the document, sign it and fax it in. EchoSign can also integrate with Google Docs and Zoho Writer.
• DocuSign. Just like EchoSign, DocuSign is a web based e-signature service. Additional features include CRM integration the ability to embed your signable documents within your web site. It also offers mobile signing if you want to use your cell phone or BlackBerry.
• E-lock. E-lock has signature solutions for both the web and your desktop. The desktop application integrates with MS Excel, MS Word, and Adobe Acrobat.

For colleagues and clients who prefer a written signature rather than a digital one, you could send your contracts via online faxing solutions such as MyFax and eFax. To make the process easier, I just pull up one of my scanned signatures on file and paste it into the document. Then, I export the entire contract as a PDF and send it off as an e-fax, avoiding any printing on my end.

There are a couple of disadvantages to e-signing, however. Some people might not read their contracts thoroughly. To prevent this you should attach a note emphasizing the importance of reading the entire document or even discuss it on the phone paragraph by paragraph, if needed. Also, you need to make sure that e-signatures are legally valid in the states and countries where each signatory resides.

With all these available tools, we no longer have an excuse to take contracts for granted. Getting the right document and the necessary signatures is only a few clicks away.

How do you manage your contracts and other legal documents? What tools do you use?

Photo by stock.xchng user wagg66

While word processors like Microsoft Word often include a one-to-one compare documents feature, what if you inherit a whole library of documents? Enter CompareMyDocs.com, a new web-based service from Nordic River, the makers of TextFlow, a version management tool. It enables you to compare multiple .rtf, .doc, and .docx documents.

Unfortunately, while it’s still in beta beta, CompareMyDocs.com works best on text-only documents (word processing documents without a lot of formatting) without images or tables. Therefore, while the service would work better on my draft WWD posts, it’s not yet suitable for the technical documentation I create by day.

I did like the ability to compare multiple versions of documents via the web interface. Bonus points go to the easy upload routine. However, I would have liked to see a bit more clarity in the interface, because, as shown in the following illustration, I only had access to Bold, Italic, and Underline controls, but to nothing else — including help. I can only assume this is due to the beta nature of the service.

Despite the limitations of the product in beta, CompareMyDocs.com is a promising tool that is worth a spot in every web worker’s bag of tricks when it comes to resolving document versioning issues, especially if you ever find yourself having to compare multiple documents at once where word processor compare documents features will take too long.

Have you tried out CompareMyDocs.com? Share your experience below.

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Microsoft Word was one of my favorite and most-used applications back in the early days. I started Mac word processing first with Word 4 and upgraded to Word 5.1 in 1993. Amazingly, that old application still starts up and works fine in Classic Mode on my G4 PowerBook.

However, the disastrous Word 6 broke my Word habit, and Word 5.1 was the last Microsoft software I ever bought. I’ve turned to other software ever since for text crunching and word processing, and don’t really miss Word except when someone sends me a Word document, or when I need to send a file to someone who works in Word.

Word-Centric World

In a Word-centric world, odds are that you will encounter Microsoft Word-formatted (.doc) documents fairly frequently, in email attachments, files produced by Word-user colleagues, or informational data downloaded from the Internet.

Happily, this is not as much of a problem as it used to be for us non-Word users. Many, in fact most, word processors can open and save Word files these days with formatting rendered reasonably faithfully..

TextEdit Can Likely Handle It

If you’re using Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5, you don’t need any other Word-savvy software other than OS X’s bundled TextEdit program, which these days warrants categorization as a full-fledged, albeit lightweight, word processor. When you need to open or save Microsoft Word-formatted documents, TextEdit can usually handle the job, and the version in OS 10.5 Leopard is the best iteration of the program yet. Unless you need perfect formatting rendition, TextEdit is up to the task.

TextEdit can open .doc files with basic formatting, such as fonts, text formatting (bold, italic, etc.), colors, line spacing, alignment and justification sustained reasonably intact. More advanced formatting, such as borders, style sheets, graphics, footnotes, bulleted lists, and such don’t often don’t survive the conversion accurately or at all. Most tables seem to translate OK, although not necessarily appearing exactly as they would in Word.

When you save a TextEdit document as a Word file, some of that sort of advanced formatting stuff actually will make the transition in the other direction, notably buttons, numbering and tables, but not style sheets. Just select one of the three Word document format options (Word 2007, Word 97 or Word 2003) and you’ve got a Word document file.

Consequently, as with the famous cartoon depicting a dog surfing the web with a computer, captioned: “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog,” with Leopard TextEdit, no one has to know you don’t have Microsoft Word. Which in certain circles, might help with your credibility.

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Watchdox uses a secure Flash-driven viewer that requires no special software download or login. When you send or receive your first WatchDox doc, you simply enter your email address to start the quick authentication process. Access to documents is controlled via email; you are authenticated when you receive an email from the site and click on a link. Easy. Of course, you must have full control over your email address and inbox — and be confident that is also true of anyone you share your documents with — for this security model to work.

If you edit a shared document, all the recipients will see the newly updated document the next time they access it. You can revoke permissions from any recipient at any time. You can also add an expiration date to documents, after which they won’t be viewable by the recipients.

All of the documents you send and receive are stored in your “My Documents” box. You can store up to 50MB on WatchDox with the free version, and documents automatically expire after 30 days. At any given time you can send up to two documents for a total of 15MB. The system is based on Amazon Web Services, so should scalable for enterprise-level needs. WatchDox provides document security for Box.net, so you might already be using it.

Watchdox is free to use while in beta. There will always be a free version for individual users, but Confidela will also introduce premium plans starting at $15/month per sender (there is no limit to document recipients).

Right now, to send and view documents, you must visit the WatchDox site unless you have Microsoft Outlook; a plugin is available that automates the document sharing process from your inbox.

One neat security-enhancing feature is that if you click away from a Watchdox document browser window, the document is instantly blurred by a virtual “curtain.” This is a clever way to mask private and confidential content from people peeking over your shoulder.

While services like Scribd have made it much easier to share documents online, WatchDox takes things to the next level by adding no-hassle (no password required) security, including a virtual paper trail.

Of course, I concede that just sharing a document online reduces its security; however, for documents that don’t have “National Security” stamped at the top, this app seems like a winner.

How are you sending your documents securely?

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I’ve been waiting for the ability to edit Word documents on the iPhone since the day I got one. Why? Because I’m a dreamer, and my dream is someday not having to lug around a laptop of any size while I’m traveling, or just out and about in the city.

My iPhone has become a big part of that dream, and the ability to edit any kind of document using it is another. The release of Quickoffice ($19.99, iTunes link) marks a big first for those editing capabilities, with full support for .doc files.

Now, Word support doesn’t mean as much to me as it once did, since I work primarily online these days, but it’s still great to have, and helpful for my own personal fiction writing. Thanks to Quickoffice, I can now edit stories and start new ones on the go, without having to first convert them to .txt or .rtf documents. Conversion doesn’t work well because a lot of the small print publishers still want .doc files, so I have to then convert back before sending.

Quickoffice does some big things right, but it also misses the mark with other features. First, uploading docs from your computer couldn’t be easier, and there’s no server app to install. You do it right in your browser by directing it to a private IP address on your local network, so it doesn’t matter if you’re using Windows or a Mac. Uploading a doc using the web interface worked flawlessly. Definitely a big plus.

Landscape editing is supported, and it does away with the interface bars to give you as much viewing space as possible. Well-thought out and customized for the platform. Editing in landscape makes working on the iPhone much less painful, and the menus aren’t really all that handy unless you’re setting up a brand new doc.

Copy and paste is supported, but since I’m using the new iPhone 3.0, Quickoffice’s implementation seems a little weak, since it actually sidesteps the built-in one. I’m sure this will be fixed by the time 3.0 is officially released, though, and for now their implementation is just fine, though it only works within Quickoffice itself and not between apps.

With Quickoffice you can also edit Excel files, though PowerPoint presentations are not yet supported. Microsoft’s newer .docx and .xlsx files are also not editable, though static versions can be viewed in Quickoffice. Honestly, that’s not really that big of a deal since most people have stuck with the older .doc standard anyway. Bottom line: if you want to edit Word documents on your iPhone, this is the way to do it for the time being, and things could be much, much worse.

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They’ve since added some features, ironed out some kinks, and set up a multi-tiered pricing plan that offers something for everyone, including a basic free version that will probably be enough for most individuals. I wanted to run it through its paces now that it’s been officially released, and see if it really was as hassle-free as advertised.

Things started well. I didn’t even need to set up an account to begin, though I chose to in order review all of doingText’s features. Sign-up was simple, too, and they didn’t ask for any unnecessary information like my phone number or street address. You can also use your OpenID to register, and apparently doingText supports Gravatars, because mine showed up on my dashboard page once I’d completed registration.

When I say “dashboard,” I use the term loosely, because doingText’s interface isn’t really complex enough to deserve that title. All you really get is a text box and an “Edit Profile” button. Pasting text from any source into the box on the right will get you started. doingText automatically formats and divides the text into boxes based on its existing formatting. The source document I used was an .rtfd file I originally created in Bean. I was pleasantly surprised to find that doingText recognized line breaks and new paragraphs automatically, so I didn’t have to rework the text at all before collaboration could begin.

Each paragraph becomes a new “block” in doingText’s editor, and hovering over one brings up an options panel on the right that allows you to make changes to, or alter the color of, each. You can also add comments to explain the changes you’ve made to the work’s original author or your co-editors. The options panel also tells you which version of the document you’re working on, so you can easily keep track of changes across iterations.

You can share your document via a randomly generated unique URL, or by embedding specially-generated code in your own web site. You can also add specific individuals as co-editors, or set a password to limit access to your document even more. Every discussion (doingText’s term for an active document) has a revision history which you can access to quickly see what’s been done and by whom. Finally, you can download the work as a .txt or .pdf file at any time. A built-in messaging system allows you to communicate with other doingText users, even if you’re not currently collaborating on anything with them.

It’s not all roses, though, and there are still some bugs to iron out. When I tried to use doingText’s search function, which supposedly looks at your discussions, I couldn’t get it to return results, either using terms in the document’s title or its body. And there’s no way to hide the “Upgrade” reminder on your dashboard, which I find mildly annoying.

doingText is quick, easy, simple and clean. People can’t complain about having to register or learn or install new software to collaborate in your documents, since registration isn’t required (even by a document creator) and there’s virtually nothing to learn or install. doingText is the best thing I’ve come across for working with other writers and editors quickly on the fly, and the free version suits my simple needs quite nicely.

Have you used doingText? What did you think?

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