QuickOffice, one of the Microsoft Office-compatible suites being developed for the iPhone, will let you view, edit and synchronize Office apps, such as Word and Excel. However, don't look for the service soon. Quickoffice expects it to be available late this year or early next year.The biggest challenge with creating an iPhone office suite is dealing with the iPhone's wacky file system issues. Each iPhone app has its own file storage space, and the apps can't access each others' spaces. So you can't save an e-mail attachment or something from Safari into a public folder to be edited by QuickOffice, for instance. Until Apple starts letting these programs interact with e-mail, it's going to be a little awkward using documents on your iPhone.
QuickOffice tries to get around the problem with an extra app, QuickAccess. QuickAccess lets you download documents from MobileMe, Google Docs or other shared Web folders to be accessed by QuickOffice, and then to reupload your edited documents to the Web. Because QuickAccess shares a developer signature with QuickOffice, apparently the three programs can all share files.
