iPhone gets its first real office application!

The iPhone combines great user interface with almost infinite possibilities in application design. But, until now, there has been a relative dearth of useful office collaboration tools. Programs that are standard in every office suite—along the lines of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel—have had no real iPhone counterparts. Until today, that is.

Softalk has announced its aptly named “Spreadsheet” application for iPhone, available immediately from the App Store for a mere $7.99 (compared with $110 for a desktop version of Excel). Featuring a standard table layout with a formula bar on top, Spreadsheet allows you to format cells with everything from text and background colors to row/column size and in-cell text alignment. Cells can also be formatted to reflect the type of data they contain, with seven choices: general, number, currency, percentage, date, time or text. Spreadsheet also features in-app copy and paste functionality, allowing cells (or ranges of cells) to be copied and pasted within a worksheet. Sadly, this functionality does not extend to the entire iPhone interface.