CloudOn is helping me access Microsoft apps on the iPad Mini

I’ve been particularly impressed at how CloudOn has been helping me get access to documents, spreadsheets and presentations when I’m on-the-go on my iPad.

Yes, there are plenty of native apps that do a reasonable job of creating and editing Office documents, however if you’re a bit of a control freak (or, simply, you like the familiarity of Office), you should be examining CloudOn.

The service enables you to connect your Google Drive, DropBox, SkyDrive and Box accounts and then fire up the documents residing there into a fully working Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint instance. A little bit like Desktop-as-a-Service. Only you’re just getting the specific apps you need. They appear in a full size window and have every single command enabled (that I can see) apart from the file menu. The file menu is disabled because you have to create and save data directly to your cloud drives rather than the Windows 7 instance established for your session.

This means you don’t need to mess around controlling a whole host of desktop setup settings. You just get immediate access — for free — to the apps that (still) matter.

I’ve been finding it invaluable to access and edit various different reports. I even wrote 60% of last month’s monthly report in the BA lounge via the iPad Mini using CloudOn.

I’m interested to see what premium offerings they bring to market.

And in terms of my on-going objective to try and remove or reduce my reliance on huge fat desktops, CloudOn is proving a very useful tool.

Give it a go and let me know what you reckon? CloudOn.