Until Microsoft builds Word for the iPhone – not that we expect that any time soon – Documents To Go is the best option you have for creating and editing word processing documents on the go.

You add documents to your iPhone using a companion app on your Mac (or PC) and then synchronise them across WiFi. (This syncing is an old Documents To Go trick; you don't merely shuttle files back and forth to your handheld device, but rather add entire folders-full of documents and keep them in sync – with a manual click.) Annoyingly, while it supports DOC, DOCX and TXT files, there's no support for RTF.

The real power of the system, though, is document editing. Even before iPhone OS 3.0 was released, DataViz had developed a copy/paste engine that feels very natural, though it meant you could only do so within the app. (As we write, an update that fixes this is on its way, presumably switching to the OS-wide framework.)

The iPhone's auto-correct keyboard intelligence is intact, and you can even use the keyboard in landscape mode if you want more finger space – and a tiny, singleline letterbox view of your document.

Though you can't change the size of text, you can manage lists, colours and more. You can jump to the beginning, middle or end of the document, do find/ replace and – can it really be true? – word, character and paragraph counts. It's not live, but it can do selection counts too.

You can view lots of other file types, but this is only a Word doc editor. There's a £6 edition that can grab attachments from Exchange servers – you can't just get them from your email in Mail – but neither can edit Excel documents never mind PowerPoint or any iWork formats.

There's no shortage of applications for the iPhone that can view documents and spreadsheets, but what's missing is a way to create or edit them. On top of that, with developments from the big name in PDA-style editing, Documents To Go, promising but not yet delivering on the iPhone, we were delighted to see the launch of Quickoffice.

After forking out our £12 – pricey by iPhone-app standards – we fired it up. The interface is good, if a little clunky, and lacks the flair of the best applications from the likes of Tapbots.

It does, however, let you create and edit Word and Excel documents. (It will view the new XML-based .docx and .xlsx formats that Office 2007/2008 creates, but currently can't edit them; an update is promised, though it makes no mention of Pages and Numbers files.)

In the document editor, you can change fonts (limited to the iPhone's web-safe list), style and size, create bulleted lists and, by Jobs, can it be true… cut, copy and paste?

The behaviour is a little fiddly, but it's bliss nevertheless. However, one problem is the keyboard's intelligence – auto-correction and the like – is missing, making typing laborious.

The spreadsheet editor is basic, but it does let you enter and edit formulas, change cell formats and, of course, cut, copy and paste. You can also grab files from (and save to) your iDisk, or mount your iPhone over a WiFi network for direct copying from a Mac or PC.

There's no way to open attachments sent by email, and while you can email files from the device or your iDisk, the system introduced odd formatting glitches.