Whenever I buy something, I want to record the purchase in a spreadsheet on my iPhone. Preferably the spreadsheet should be in the cloud so I can access it easily from both my phone and computer.

OneDrive

Currently I'm using OneDrive to store cloud-based spreadsheets.

However, OneDrive is a pain in the ass because it takes ages to open the spreadsheet. I did a test just now with a file of 76 KB. I timed myself as I opened the app and then opened the spreadsheet from inside the app. I did the test file four times, and the results were: 36 seconds, 26 seconds, 23 seconds and 15 seconds. Surely there must be a faster way?

Dropbox

Next I tried Dropbox. I put the Excel file in my Dropbox folder and then opened it via the Dropbox app on my iPhone. Dropbox took 20 seconds to open the spreadsheet, which is about the same amount of time as OneDrive. But Dropbox was more annoying because I had to tap four times to open the spreadsheet instead of just two: one tap to open the app, a second tap to open the file, a third tap to select 'edit' and a fourth tap to select 'Excel' as my desired program.

Excel

I then tried opening the spreadsheet directly through the Excel app, and the spreadsheet opened in just 8 seconds! But when I tried again and it took 16 seconds. Well, that's still faster than Dropbox and OneDrive.

Google Drive

Next I tried Google Drive. This app took 20 seconds to open the spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet was completely blank when it finally opened. Strange. I guess that means the Google Sheets app can't open Excel files.

Google Sheets

Next I created a new spreadsheet in my Google Drive and then opened it directly using the Google Sheets app. It took just 5 seconds to open! That's what I'm talking about.

However, perhaps Google Sheets's fast speed was just because the file size was so small. So I reran some of the tests with an empty spreadsheet. OneDrive took 21 seconds to open this spreadsheet, and the Excel app took 14 seconds. So despite the small file size, these apps still took a long time to open the spreadsheet.

Conclusion

So in conclusion, the winner is Google's Sheets app, which opened my spreadsheet in a mere 5 seconds.

Here's the a table of the results of my tests: