Nokia is a decent trade in place of Ballmer

Microsoft needs to go mobile with their products and Nokia has lost their cool factor with the market.

iCloud document sync works for applications that support it. Which doesn't (yet?) include MS Office, AFAIK.

I think you will have to use a 3rd party sync application to synchronize MS Office documents across iPhone/iPad/iMac. I've heard good things about SugarSync, but not tried it myself.

More broadly -

Apple is trying to get away from the traditional approach of treating files and folders and applications as separate things that the user has to manually manage.

In the traditional (computer) realm, the user creates a hierarchical folder structure, chooses where to store various files in those folders and subfolders, opens an application and navigates to a particular folder, subfolder, then file, and opens that file. In the new (smartphone) world, the user opens an application and opens the desired file created in that application, finding it with an unstructured search (like searching the web) rather than by navigating a folder structure, in fact as far as the user knows there is no visible folder structure - everything is "flat".

Not sure which approach I prefer. I'd say the "computer" approach is better for advanced, organized users dealing with a lot of files - power users. I think the "smartphone" approach is better for casual users. Over the years, the Windows and Mac OS'es made the "computer" approach fairly accessible to casual users, mostly by creating a default folder structure ("MyDocuments" etc), automatically assigning particular applications to particular file types, and including auto-indexing/search. The iOS and Android OS'es have a ways to go to make the "smartphone" approach suitable for power users, but they have just started and since unstructured search techniques are powerful enough to handle the whole internet, it can clearly handle the output of a single user.

Anyway, iCloud document sync works in the context of the smartphone approach. If the application supports iCloud sync (the API is available to all) then when you open the application on a device - iPhone, iPad, Mac - all the documents you created with the application on any of your device are automatically available on all of your devices. The problem currently is that not that many applications support iCloud sync. iCloud document sync isn't intended to work in the context of the computer approach - you can't point to an arbitrary file or subfolder and say "I want this mirrored across all my devices". I doubt that will ever be enabled, it doesn't really make sense in a smartphone world.

Another option, BTW, is to use GoogleDocs, access documents that live in the cloud via a web-based application. That is how my high school daughter and her friends do it. They hardly use MS Office and wouldn't even understand what you meant by synchronizing local file copies across devices.

Android has a standard file structure. You have access to the files either with a file manager (which then auto launches the appropriate program) or you open the program and it find all the files for you (Docs to go).

The main thing I like is I can connect to any LAN drive or FTP site and grab the files I want and drag them to my Android device. Or I can connect my Android device and drag and drop files onto it from my PC.

The "best" thing would be a seamless syncing in the background. Any files I've worked on with my PC are available on ANY other device. I think this is where Office 365 is going.

The "problem" with storing everything in the cloud is a combination of bandwidth for syncing and security. I know that for most of my programs I'm better of copying files from our server THEN working on them locally, than trying to open them through the VPN.

Also, I don't really want to keep my data "in the cloud". Who exactly is safeguarding my information?

About 25 years ago, while working on my undergrad degree in computer science, my professor predicted that object-oriented coding and relational database processing will be the future of computational processing.

Took 25 years for the hardware and software to make this prediction viable, but the future is now. :)

-Z

I think - not positive - that iCloud will let you manually drag files from device to device. But it is manual, not sync'ing.

AFAIK. I don't actually create documents on the iPhone/iPad. With laptops now so thin and light, with real keyboards and Haswell power, 10 hour batteries and nice touchscreens, and tablet-like form factors if you must have that, I can't imagine trying to peck out a spreadsheet on an iPad. View one - maybe. Write an email, sure.