Quickoffice–which was the first office suite for the iPhone–is now the first with a very cool feature: built-in support for Google Docs. It’s part of Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite 3.0, which was announced this week at Macworld 2010.

The new version lets you open word-processing documents and spreadsheets stored in Google Docs’ online repository, edit them, and save them back to Google Docs. And it lets you do the same for files saved at online-storage services Box.net and Dropbox. (Quickoffice already had similar support for Apple’s MobileMe service.) These cloud-based storage features are particularly useful given that Apple still doesn’t enable office suites like Quickoffice to open file attachments. (The suite does offer a workaround that requires you to forward attachments to a special address.)

I told Quickoffice my Google Docs login credentials, and it let me see all the documents I’ve created and stored there:

Medium-sized nitpick: Google Docs itself shows the files you’ve edited most recently first, and allows you to search for documents, so it’s generally very easy to find documents even if you haven’t organized them in folders. (Which I haven’t.) Quickoffice, however, lists everything in alphabetical order. You’ll be able to find your documents, but it might take more scrolling around to hunt them down.

This new version of Quickoffice requires you to sign up for an account with the company which it uses to help manage file conversions. It’s a quick process, but some customers are squawking about it in reviews at the iTunes App Store. Maybe the Quickoffice folks could help minimize unhappiness by making it clearer what they will and won’t do with your information when you sign up.

Quickoffice continues to compete with Dataviz’s mobile office suite Documents to Go–and in a perfect world, there’d be one suite that had all the best features of both products. Documents to Go has a presentation app–Quickoffice only does word processing and spreadsheets, though presentations are in the works–and built-in access to file attachments in Microsoft Exchange and Gmail accounts. But it doesn’t have Quickoffice’s useful new cloud-storage features.

Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite is a very reasonable $9.99. There’s also a $7.99 version without the new cloud features, and Quickoffice Connect, a free app that lets view and share files stored in the cloud services, but not edit them. They’re all available now at the App Store.

 
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