Quip’s spreadsheets get row freezing, conditional formatting, and table mode

Quip, a startup with mobile apps for crafting and collaborating on documents, has turned on some useful capabilities when it comes to working with spreadsheets.

Now you can click a couple of buttons to create rules that will highlight certain cells in a spreadsheet — those that are equal to, greater than, or less than a number, and those that contain specific text.

“We plan on adding more rules over time,” Quip’s Yunjie Ma pointed out in a blog post on the news today.

Also new: You can now freeze rows you select in the app. That way it’s easier to understand the meaning of information in cells below those rows. Column freezing is on the way.

Quip has also created something called Table Mode, which displays tables but leaves off the row and column numbers. Nifty.

Of course, there are other companies out there that let you work with spreadsheets when you’re on the go. Most prominently, there’s Google, with Google Spreadsheets, as well as Microsoft, which has brought its popular Office software suite to more mobile devices lately. Meanwhile, Box has added document-creation features into its application in the past couple of years. Competitors could be looking to make similar moves.

Last year Quip started letting you work with spreadsheets and even embed them in text documents on mobile devices. Also last year, Quip tacked on a full-text search function.