Sheet Squared review

Spreadsheets. You either love them, or hate them. Most people hate them. However, Excel is arguably one of the most versatile tools ever to be created by Microsoft, even if you do need to have a seriously systematic mind to get the most out of it.

Whether you use spreadsheets to keep simple lists of dates or items or for fabricating complicated financial models that project profit margins for years into the future, they are undeniably useful.

Sheet² aims to deliver much of the more advanced functionality of desktop spread sheet apps to your iPhone, something that could potentially have you leaving your laptop at home. This will undoubtedly be an attractive prospect for many a commuter.

Starting off with the interface, the developer has done a good job to keep things clean and intuitive. You can add folders - or 'workgroups' as they're called in the app - and have as many folders within folders as you like.

In order to get files onto the app, you'll need to use a service such as iDisk or Google Docs, both of which can be turned on in the settings menu.

This is an acceptable way of accessing your work but we cant help but feel a similar system to Clip2Mobile would have been a good idea, allowing you to drop and drop spread sheets to the app from your desktop.

Once you've opened up a spreadsheet, you can do just about anything to it that you could with a full-blown version of desktop software.

The app will open, edit and save files created with Excel, Numbers or NeoOffice. The list of financial functions such as ABS, Median, and Substitute that it can perform is so long that we cant list all of them in this review.

You can edit entire rows or columns, change the text or background colours of individual cells from a huge pallet and write your own mathematical formulas for each individual cell in the spread sheet.

In the help menu, in depth tutorials will help you do just about anything you could want, a very welcome feature in this potentially complicated app.

The downside here though is that complex spread sheets require a surprising amount of processing power to work with.

Even if your browsing a text-heavy spread sheet without complex equations, scrolling around is a far cry from the snappy navigation you might expect from a decent laptop.

With a little patience and a some practice though, you do get used to it. If you work with spread sheets a lot, the versatility of Sheet² makes having it on your iPhone as a back-up for laptop failures is all but essential.

Sheet² info

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Platform: Apple iPhone/iPod Touch

Price: £2.39

Version: 3.0

Developer: Byte²

Website/Demo: Byte² website

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