Comprehensive Guide to Using Your iPhone as a Portable Office

2011-09-15

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As you are never seen anywhere without your iPhone (apart from perhaps the bathroom, and that’s just sensible), it stands to reason that it can be put to great use as a portable pocket office. The iPhone can manage every single area of your business life that you can think of, whether you are at the office, on a business trip, meeting clients, giving a presentation, or working from home.

Our guide starts with general reviews and round-ups of apps that you should look at first, to get you prepared and organized, as well as some tips on using the iPhone for business use.

Retrieving, viewing and editing documents is something you are likely to need to do pretty often, and there are a wealth of options for you there too, as well as being able to do this and other actions when you are away from office. So once you’ve edited that document, how do you transfer it, or share it with others to see? – there is a fantastic section on dealing with all areas of file management.

We haven’t forgotten the more traditional office activities such as printing, scanning and faxing, and turning your iPhone into a gizmo for business presentations. We round off with some choice articles on using your iPhone in the field of project management.

Get Started with Some Great Business Apps

Before we get specific, why not take a look at this selection of articles that cover using the iPhone for general business use. Whether you are a manager and need an app to keep you organized, just need to keep on top of things with notes, or sync up your appointments with your Microsoft calendar, there are plenty of options for you. We’ve even thrown in some useful tips on keyboard shortcuts to help you save time.

Docs in your Pocket

Although there are a whole host of apps that excel (pun intended) at document viewing and editing, if your documents are important then you don’t want to lose them due to an app that doesn’t work for you. This is where our documents guide comes in. We’ll kick off with opening attached files in an email, and then take in some reviews and app round-ups of document software for the iPhone. And when we say documents we don’t just mean .docs as there are Excel apps, WDB files and a whole lot more besides. Some of these let you view a document, whereas others allow you to edit and pretty much work as they would do on a PC. Continue to the next section if you are wondering about sharing and transferring the amended files.

Files can get in a mess if you don’t keep things organized, especially when you only have a small space like the hard disk of an iPhone to keep everything stored, so what is the answer? There are a multitude of solutions here from sharing files, transferring them elsewhere, and syncing them between devices. We even show you how to get text messages from your iPhone onto a PC.

Stay in Touch with the Office

Whether you are on a business trip, out meeting clients, or working from your home office, your iPhone can be a great tool for keeping you in touch, in more ways than just being used as a phone (perish the thought!). We’ve pulled together articles here that will help you manage schedules, access your notes, make sure your files are secure, and even that old classic of call forwarding. You can even leave your laptop at home with some of these apps, and what’s more we’ll throw in some advice on reducing your data usage, which can certainly mount up when you don’t have the luxury of a Wi-Fi connection.

Scanning, Printing & Faxing

Standard office favorites of scanning, printing and faxing are easy to overlook in this digital age, but are still very necessary and digital examples of this are still at the core of most businesses. Your iPhone can be transferred into a simple scanner, or something more sophisticated like an OCR or a business card reader – saving you loads of hard work transcribing details. Printing from your iPhone is a breeze and we have a round-up of apps in the printing arena as well as some top apps for faxing too.

Business Presentations Sorted

No longer do you have to lug around tons of equipment from the office if you are required to do a business presentation, you can store everything you need on your iPhone. Not only does this mean that any supplementary information is within a finger tap, your phone can use presentation software like PowerPoint, and there are even iPhone accessories in the form of projectors so whatever is on your screen can be seen by everyone.

Manage That Project and Stay in Budget

Although this is our section on project management with the iPhone, most of these apps would be extremely useful in many other business cases too. Our first article takes a thorough look at the ten best applications for project management, and then we move on to look at expense tracker and budget apps - useful to have in anyone’s life.

Obviously, depending on your area of business there might well be many more areas in which the iPhone could help, but hopefully this guide to using your iPhone as an office has covered most bases. If there’s any app we’ve left out, that you wouldn’t be without, please let us know.