Home Forums Peripherals & Multimedia iTunes, iPhone, iPod, iPad, Apple TV Storing Excel Spreadsheets on iPhone 4S

When I receive email on my iPhone 4S with an Excel spreadsheet as an attachment, I don't know what to do with it. I'd like to be able to store it in a folder on the iPhone 4S and be able to display it as needed, but I'm not sure how to do it. I don't expect to be able to do new work on the spreadsheet since Excel for the iPhone is only in my dreams, but I would like to view it for the information that is on it.

The only thought I have on this is to start with the attachment on my Mac Pro's Desktop and print it as a PDF. Then, I could send it as a PDF attached to an email to my iPhone and use Adobe Reader to store and display it. That's a bit clumsy, especially when I'm on the road without my Mac Pro. Any suggestions for doing this completely on my iPhone?

If it's in Gmail, I think you can save it to your Google Drive on your phone and view it there?

Thanks, but I only have Google Maps.

If your iPhone 4S has iOS 6.1 installed, you have Numbers 1.7.2 on your iPhone, and an Apple ID, you can open most (almost all) Excel documents in Numbers and from there you can either…

1. Leave the spreadsheet open in Numbers which will keep it in memory, ready to view, or modify, email, or whatever at will. You can have as many spreadsheets open as you have memory for.
2. Alternatively, if you have Numbers set to use iCloud it will automatically save the spreadsheet to iCloud. (You can then close Numbers if you wish). After that you can open Numbers and retrieve the spreadsheet from iCloud at your pleasure. Storing the spreadsheet on iCloud has the added advantage of making it accessible to you Mac or any other iDevice.

One clarification: Numbers is not automatically included with iOS 6.x. It is a paid, but inexpensive, download from the App Store.

I do have Pages on my iPhone. I've tried moving Excel files to Numbers in the past. I have some formulae that require iteration. Unfortunately, Numbers doesn't do iteration, so I'm stuck. That one feature is why I keep using MS Office.

I still haven't used any cloud technology. I'm waiting to see what their longer term safety record really is before moving to it. I know it's handy, but my stuff is proprietary and I don't want to risk it at this point. Thanks for the suggestions, though. I really appreciate the help.

Adobe Reader on the iPhone is really set up to store PDF's. In the long run, I think this will be the better way for me because I also have Adobe Acrobat Pro for the Mac so I can produce PDF's from scratch.