Access your Excel spreadsheets with a tablet or smartphone

With mobile apps like DocsToGo you can view and edit Excel spreadsheets from just about anywhere.

As increasingly we're carrying tablets and smartphones with us, we expect them to double as work tools so we can at least see our data, if not work on it, too. However, there are significant compatibility and access issues to deal with anytime you step away from your desk. Here we explore these issues with Excel spreadsheets and offer one possible solution.

When it comes to taking your Excel data on the road and accessing it with a tablet, the procedure is a lot more complex than uploading the file to your Skydrive account and working on it there. While you can access Skydrive and your files using Safari on the iPad 2, for example, you can only view your worksheets — you can’t edit them or click on a cell to view the underlying formula.

At the time of writing, Microsoft hadn’t produced any Office apps for the iPad, so the apps you’ll be using to work with your Excel data come from other developers. The good news is that there are quite a few apps that allow you to access to your Excel spreadsheets on the go. The bad news is the level to which they can do this successfully varies, as does the ease of getting to your worksheets.

One issue with these apps is not only whether they can open and view the contents of your worksheet file, but what the app does to unsupported features when it saves the file again. It’s reasonable to expect to view your data, but most apps won’t show you charts or any advanced features at all. This may not be an issue for many people, but what will be is if the unsupported features are stripped from the file when it’s saved.

If you’re working with someone else’s worksheets, it won’t be acceptable if the price of opening a file to change a few figures is that the program strips the worksheet of all its formatting and charts.

For these reasons, we strongly recommend that you back up your original spreadsheets and do some testing — editing your typical spreadsheets with the mobile app and comparing it with the original files within Excel.

The other issue is one of file management — just how do you get your file onto your tablet to access it and how do you get it off when you’ve finished with it? And when you do so, where does it go?

It’s the file management issue that hampers Apple’s own Numbers spreadsheet app. While it does a good job of allowing you to edit an Excel workbook, actually getting the file into Numbers is an unreasonably complex process.

One of the better mobile Office apps that we've used is DocsToGo Premium (http://www.dataviz.com/products/documentstogo/) which incorporates a worksheet, word processor and presentation tools within an iOS, Android or Blackberry app. To access to your files you can use online storage, such as Google Docs, Box.net, Dropbox, iDisk, Public iDisk or SugarSync.

Edit spreadsheets with DocsToGo

Here installed Dropbox on our PC and copied some Excel spreadsheets to the Dropbox folder so that we can access via the online storage service. Remember to keep backups of the originals just in case.

On the iPad, we’ve set up DocsToGo to link to the Dropbox account, and then open and edit an Excel file. This file had a chart in it, which isn’t showing in DocsToGo, but the worksheet data can be edited.

When we save the file, it’s uploaded back to Dropbox, which is synced automatically with the Dropbox folder on our local computer. When the file is opened in Excel on the local computer, the chart thankfully reappears and reflects the changes made to the underlying data in DocsToGo on the iPad.