Google completes its office suite for iOS, to no one’s benefit

When I hear about companies and government agencies adopting Google Docs or Google Apps, I figure they must use no mobile devices in their work, because Google’s decent Web productivity apps are horribly limited when used on a mobile browser, whether iOS’s Safari or Android’s Chrome. When Google bought Quickoffice, once the leading mobile office productivity suite, a couple years ago, I figured Google would boost its productivity suite via native iOS and Android apps.

But that didn’t happen. Google has discontinued Quickoffice, but it hasn’t brought that excellent tool’s word-processing or spreadsheet capabilities into its mobile apps: first Google Drive, then the spun-out Google Docs and Google Sheets apps. Quickoffice had only basic editing capabilities for presentations, so it didn’t have much to help Google’s mobile apps. Making presentation editing work well on mobile would be entirely up to Google.

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This week, Google finally released Google Slides for iOS, bringing the third leg of its office productivity suite to the iPad and iPhone. It was already on Android, but the iPad is — for now — the predominant tablet for business. It’s also the only tablet for which there are serious touch-savvy productivity apps, namely Apple’s very good iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) and Microsoft’s good Office suite (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint).

As they say on Broadway, if you can make it in iOS, you can make it anywhere. But the Google App suite (Docs, Sheets, and Drive) is of community-center dinner-theater quality. Even for free, it’s not a good deal. That’s harsh, but Google’s crappy mobile software has been crappy for years. It has improved its desktop Web apps considerably, but not its mobile tools. A company with a mobile platform that dominates the industry should be producing much better mobile software.

Opening and saving files the Keystone Cops way What’s wrong with Slides? What’s right is that — like this week’s revised versions of Docs and Sheets — it can now (finally!) open Microsoft’s file formats directly. Before, you had to open them in Drive and convert them to Google’s own format before the Apps suite could open the files.

Did I say “directly”? That’s not always true. You have to switch to Google Drive to bring in any files stored there into Slides (or Docs or Sheets). One of the cool things about Quickoffice is that it lets you open and save files to any number of cloud services. iWork apps can open and save directly from and to Apple’s iCloud, just as Microsoft’s Office apps can do with Microsoft’s OneDrive. But Google Apps can’t open files directly from its Drive.

In a typical example of Google’s low quality, when you try to open a document on Google Drive into Slides, Docs, or Sheets, you get an error message saying you need to first install the app — even if the app is already installed. If you switch to the app, you’ll see that the file was in fact transferred to it. If you want to avoid the error message, you can do a brute-force transfer in Drive to your iOS device by tapping the “i” button to the right of a file name, then setting the Keep on Device switch to On. Imagine the tech support calls that will engender!

If you try to open a locally stored file in any of the Google Apps apps, you’ll see that the filename is truncated after about 10 characters — often meaning you can’t tell one file for another (especially for revisions). Google Drive shows a wide filename, but not Docs, Sheets, or Slides.

Wait till you try to save your changes! There’s no save option for PowerPoint-formatted files, and when you exit the file, your changes are discarded — not saved automatically as you’d expect. The More menu’s Share & Export submenu has the option to save the file to the native Google Slides format. Get used to it if you want to your changes to take — then losing Office compatibility until you export it to a native Office format later. (The desktop Web version works the same unintuitive way, incidentally.)

Docs and Sheets do save your changes when you close your Microsoft Office files, no conversion required. What seems to be going on with Slides in iOS is that takes a long time to sync the changes back to Google Drive, so it loses the changes. In my tests, I ended up with multiple copies of the same document, likely from each time I opened it and redid my changes — almost always without the changes I had made. When I used Slides in Android, the changes were saved, even if I ddn’t convert the files from PowerPoint format to the Slides format. This is clearly a bug in the iOS version of Slides.

If you remember those early-20th-century Keystone Cops films about comedically hapless cops, you get a sense of what it’s like to deal with files in Google Apps in iOS.

A slideshow tool that can do only the basics When you open a presentation in Slides, you quickly discover you can do only the basics with it: Edit text, apply text formatting, move and delete items, add photos and shapes, view and edit presenter notes, and move, delete, and add slides. In other words, you can touch up presentations and create basic ones — that’s it. You can’t control slide transitions, apply animations, spell-check, or execute any of a dozen more sophisticated tasks you can do in Apple’s Keynote for iOS, Microsoft’s PowerPoint for iPad — or in Google Slide in a desktop browser. And note that resize handles respond to your gestures only intermittently, so resizing elements is a hit-or-miss proposition.

If you are a salesperson or a conference presenter working on your iPad on the road, you won’t want to use Slides. If you’re a Google Apps shop, your staff will need to bring your laptop — or go rogue and use Apple’s Keynote. (You could use Microsoft’s PowerPoint, but its iPad office suite requires an Office 365 subscription, and it’s not as adept as Google Apps or Apple iWork at working on files across cloud storage services.)

And forget any bells and whistles, such as Office’s ability to set a password to app access or Keynote’s ability to remote-control a presentation from another iOS device or Mac.

This limited creation and editing capability is not limited to Slides; Docs and Sheets have the same limitations. The Android versions are also more limited than the desktop Web versions, by the way, but you’ll get extra features in Android versus what you get in iOS. An example is the ability to do tables in a text document in Android’s Docs. Google Apps for Android is better than Google Apps for iOS, but still short of Google Apps for a desktop browser.

The bottom line is that Google’s Apps trio is a poor choice for mobile productivity, and it’s much less capable than its desktop Web suite. Any organization with a serious mobile workforce should be looking at Apple or Microsoft for productivity tools that are capable across the desktop, Web, and mobile environments. Not Google.

This article, “Google completes its office suite for iOS, to no one’s benefit,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.