Mariner Software has turned 20—quite an achievement for a software company that started out competing against Microsoft with Mariner Write and Mariner Calc. They’ve since added numerous more proprietary programs, such as Montage, StoryMill, and MacJournal. And this weekend, the majority of their Macintosh products on sale for 40% off.

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.

iWork and MS Office are both great apps depending on your needs and wants. MS Office is great for people who need to have compatibility with Windows users and iWork is a great addition to the rest of the Mac apps. So the question is, which one should you get? Each has its upsides and more »