Instead of giving you a long story about Dropbox, I want to give you a really cool use case that I just discovered recently.
If, for some reason, you haven't heard of Dropbox, please follow the link below to sign up immediately. To summarize, it's a service/app that lets you sync up to 2GB of data on the web and to your Mac/PC/iPhone/Other Mobile Device for free (I pay $10/month for 50GB, which is well worth it). It is the 2nd most useful app I use on a daily basis (next to GMail).
For those of you who use Dropbox, run Windows, and also own an iPhone, I just found out a really great use. A colleague of mine runs a Mac, and does a lot of work in iWork. There are quite a few files that we both need to see on a regular basis. We have a shared folder setup in Dropbox that we both add files to daily. Most of my files are Office documents (.docx, .xlsx, etc), and most of the files he adds are iWork files (.pages, .numbers, etc). I was originally having a hard time opening these files. I found out that the iWork files are really just like zip files, and if you unzip them, you can get a type of preview file that lets you see the contents. This works in a pinch, but the preview file tends to be small and grainy. I finally had a moment of clarity a couple weeks ago. Since my iPhone runs a Mac-based OS, and I have the Dropbox app installed, maybe I can open the files there. Eureka! I can see all of the iWork files perfectly from my iPhone, without any conversion required. It's almost like having a 2 monitor setup when I'm working on my laptop, albeit a very small 2nd screen. If I need to enter an invoice from Pages, I open it up on the iPhone, and enter it into QuickBooks on my laptop.
Considering that Windows is still the dominant OS, and the iPhone is so prevalent, I'm hoping that this tip will help apply to many of you out there. Do you have a great use case for Dropbox? Let me know in the comments!
https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTQ1MzExMzk - Sign up from this link to get an extra 250MB free!!
Hi Eric,
ReplyDeleteI'm a big Dropbox fan. It's always in the top 5 of my "cool tools" list. Thanks for the insight into using it with an iPhone. This post gets a retweet from me!