Best Office App for Sales Reps on the go?

[robertpetry]

Hello all,

I know the comparison of Office apps has been made in a few threads but with the updates from iWork and Quick Office and others, many of the reviews and discussions out there are out of date.

I think my use case is pretty typical. I am in and out of the office and need to access and edit MS Office documents that are either emailed to me or are on my office PC. I can get to the documents on the office PC via Logmein or Dropbox typically. It is the functionality of the programs and their handling of documents that I am most interested in.

I need to be able to round trip .docx and .pptx files primarily. I will receive them for review, need to edit or pass them along when I am done. Tracking Changes is a critical feature that none seem to have yet. Hopefully that will change. Using notes would be a good workaround for now.

But the main thing is I need to import, see fonts and graphics as they were intended, and export so that the doc looks like it did when I received it. PPTX and DOCX. I do use Excel to review simple spreadsheets but nothing fancy and usually one tab.

Yes the GUI is important to me but the round trip functionality is more important.

So QO? Office HD? iWorks? Docs2Go(but worried about Blackberry's purchase and further development)?

What have you folks with similar needs been using?

 

[robertpetry]

Also, will any of these programs let me host slideshow presentations on a projector? I know iWork will but do any of the others use the projector kit?

 

[thunderbunny]

As far as I've discovered Keynote is the only app to support the VGA adaptor which is a shame, would like to be able to have the capability to share any app on the projector.

I find iWork reasonable, probably better now Numbers and Keynote will export MS format too now. Not really played with this, some changes to animations when exporting to PowerPoint but doesn't ruin them completely (same as exporting from Mac Keynote really). Limited to the preset fonts but docs have looked pretty similar to me, but most docs I have used have standardish fonts.

Curiously Keynote on iPad was the only thing that I was able to open a PowerPoint presentation a collaborator sent me recently- tried 3 different windows/PowerPoint systems with no luck.

 

[robertpetry]

Well, I did find another app that leverages the VGA out, PDF Reader by Kdan Mobile Software. So if you PDF presentations you can scroll through them. Not very pretty but you can show documents with it.

Importing my PPTX files has some real issues with the latest Keynote. Fonts that run over the edges of their boxes, arrows that become boxes, shapes and graphics that don't appear correctly. It is not a smooth conversion.

I'm afraid my iPad is not ready for business use until these issues are worked out.