Quickoffice Pro HD for Android

CNET Editors' review

by: Jaymar Cabebe on May 01, 2012

As its name suggests, Quickoffice Pro HD is a mobile office and productivity suite for use on the go. It lets you create and edit office files, and even sync them to your favorite cloud storage service.

If you're a fan of Google Docs like I am, then you've probably noticed that editing files from your mobile device can be a bit of a pain. The Google Drive (download) app (which recently slurped up Google Docs) doesn't offer a very robust menu of formatting tools, which makes workflow more complicated than it should be (especially when dealing with spreadsheets). Fortunately, with Quickoffice, you get quite a bit more functionality.

While Quickoffice is certainly no replacement for a full desktop office suite, it does get you closer to a desktop experience than the Google Drive app does. Quickoffice can open up and edit Word (DOC, DOCX), Excel (XLS, XLSX), and Powerpoint (PPT, PPTX) files, plus it can create new files in a number of different Office formats. And as a pretty significant bonus, it comes with built-in PDF annotation tools, for drawing, highlighting, inserting shapes, and commenting on PDF files.

When working with documents, you can edit the type, color, and size of fonts, as well as paragraph alignment. You can even insert images and tables. Meanwhile, the spreadsheets editor doesn't have as many formatting options, but it does make it easy to zip around sheets, and add or delete rows and columns. Plus, Quickoffice offers a library of commonly used formulas for all of the Excel power users. When it comes to presentations, Quickoffice does an admirable, but not outstanding job. It can let you easily view presentations, as well as add images, shapes, arrows, and buttons. But unfortunately, it can't display animations created in PowerPoint, which can be a huge problem for many.

One thing I love about Quickoffice is its ability to integrate with cloud storage accounts like Dropbox, Google Docs (Drive), SugarSync, Box, MobileMe, and more. Since I house many of my files outside of my local hard drive, this makes my experience more or less seamless. With Quickoffice, I can easily access files when I need them, then save them back in cloud account or right on my mobile device's local drive.

Overall, I think Quickoffice has a long way to go if it hopes to compete with desktop office experiences. It's awesome at performing basic edits and functions, but it's missing a few power features like presentation animations, cell merging, and document templates. That said, Quickoffice is still heads and tails above the Google Drive app in terms of editing power, and it comes seamlessly integrated with a bevy of different cloud-storage services.