MS Office & Dropbox

Dropbox announces mobile Office app support

by with No Comment Apps

We’ve partnered with Microsoft Office to help you do more on your phone or tablet. Now you can edit Office files from the Dropbox app and access your Dropbox directly from the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps for iPhone and iPad.

When you’re inside the Office apps, sign in to your Dropbox account to:

  • Edit Office files from the Dropbox mobile app and sync changes across devices.

  • Access Dropbox files from the new Office apps and save new files to Dropbox.

  • Share Dropbox links from Office when you’ve finished making changes.

This is significant and I think shows the way ahead for a lot of the Social Business mobile apps out there.  Being able to access all our documents whilst on the mobile is important, but being able to edit them using native full-fidelity apps and to return the new version for colleagues to see immediately is a real step forward.

I’m seeing an increasing number of users using iPads as their primary device whilst at work and especially whilst travelling – it’s not such edge-cases like Federico Viticci that have switched to tablets full-time.  It is functionality such as Microsoft and Dropbox are delivering that will help close the productivity gap between tablets and desktops once and for all.

Dropbox just gets better – try the iPhone/iPod/iPad app

by with No Comment Misc

Since the Lotusphere presentation sharing project initiated by Vowe earlier this year, I’ve been using Dropbox a great deal – it really is the great solution for adhoc sharing of files, photos and more, particularly for non-professional purposes, or where ease of use is more important than security or compliance.

As well as accessing your files via the Dropbox web site and your choice of operating system plugin, there is also an app for your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad:

Dropbox.
There’s an app for that.

  * Access your Dropbox on the go
  * Download files for offline viewing
  * Sync photos and videos to your Dropbox
  * Share links to files in your Dropbox

This now means that all files I share are now immediately available on my mobile devices, including PDFs, documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc. The built-in Apple editors/viewers render most content I would look to have access to (ODF formats are still an issue).

I know that I could do the same kind of sharing with Lotus Quickr and SNAPPS app for the device, but DropBox just works and is much easier to provision for non-technical folks.

Sign-up now to get your free 2GB DropBox account.