Dropbox for document sharing

I have been hearing about Dropbox for a while and finally yesterday decided to test it to see if I can easily view my word and excel documents on my iPhone and iPad. Sure enough the sign up and setup took only a few minutes.

Essentially you download the application from http://www.dropbox.com/downloading, install it on your computer and you are ready to go. Dropbox is free for the first 2GB of data and if you need more storage you pay for it.

The way it works is by adding your documents to a Dropbox folder. The soon you add the file it will be synchronised which means uploaded to your online webspace and then ready to be accessed and viewed from any other computer or iPhone. To view your shared documents on your iPhone you first need to install the free drop box application from here: Get Dropbox from iTunes.

I was quite impressed how quickly the documents I shared were synced and ready to view on my iPhone. One very useful feature of Dropbox for iPhone and iPad is support for all major document formats including Word, excel, Pages, Numbers and many more. This means that you can view all these document formats on your iPhone or iPad without the need of any other application. But one thing you can’t do is to edit them.

Another document sharing alternative to Dropbox is Mobile Me by Apple. I haven’t used Mobile Me so can’t comment about it. If you are a Mobile Me or Dropbox user I would love to read your comments on them.