Appnoodle

There’s no doubt about it, ‘out of the box’ the G1 lacks the kind of functionality which would make it first choice for the average business user – one of the shortcomings being the inability to create, edit or even view Microsoft Office files. Fortunately though, the people at Dataviz have come up with a solution, for Word and Excel at least, with their Documents to Go app for Android.

With the ability to open and edit both 97-2003 and 2007 Word and Excel files this looks like the perfect mobile office solution for the G1/HTC Dream or G2/HTC Magic but does it live up to expectation and can a phone realistically be used to work on word processor or spreadsheet? Hopefully this review will go some way to answering those questions.

Before we go any further we’ll save the time of those who don’t believe any app is worth paying for by saying up front that the app costs $19.99. Unfortunately, the kind of functionality delivered here does come at a price. Whether you’re willing to pay it is of course your call…

…Still with us? Then you’ll be glad to know that although pricier than the average app (ie, not free) it’s also better than the average app.

Word to Go.
Documents to Go is made up of two modules. We’ll deal with them both starting with the imaginitively titled Word to Go which you’ll be unsurprised to learn is the word processor module.

The first pleasant surprise is just how much of the basic functionality of Word can be drawn upon when creating a document – this isn’t just a basic text editor like ‘Text Edit’ or ‘OI Notepad’. In fact it’s perfectly possible to create a completely serviceable document which doesn’t require much, if any, remedial work once it’s back on your PC. For example, the following text and formatting options are all avaliable:

• Bold, italic, superscript, subscript and underlined text
• Text colo(u)r options
• Paragraph settings including alignment options, indents and line spacing
• Half a dozen font options including Arial, calibri, Times New Roman and Wingdings

Page breaks are taken care of too, as are ordered and unordered lists, and perhaps most surprisingly, the creation of tables. This is one feature that might need some adjustment later on since editing table properties does not appear to be possible. You can also add comments to documents in the usual way.

Opening a 20 page document created in Word 2007 went smoothly enough with all data retained and editable except headers and footers. Happily, the data is retained and is visible again if the document is saved and opened in Word.

Sheet to Go
Simple Excel documents can be created with no problems at all. Pivot tables are, perhaps unsurprisingly, beyond the capabilities of the app but those used to taking advantage of inbuilt Excel functions will be pleased to learn that a good selection of these are available for use in the application.

Reasonably large multiple sheets are handled  (a 20 sheet workbook opened without difficulty) but not all functions are supported and although a document with unsupported functions can be opened it can’t be edited. Clicking on a cell in this case will result in a message to that affect and attempting to edit will result in details of the problematic cells being displayed. In our experiment with a spreadsheet containing a number of functions the only one to cause a problem was the ‘Lookup’ function. So, if you are hoping to edit complex documents on the go with Docs to Go checking out the list of supported functions would be a good idea.

So what happens to enbedded charts? Well, unfortunately you can’t create them in the application and they’re not displayed if present in a document created in Excel. Not so good then, but a link is maintained between an existing chart and its associated data even if opened on the device. What this means in practice is that even though a chart may not be visible on the phone, any changes you make to the data are reflected in the chart once the document is saved and re-opened in Excel.

Email Integration
One particularly neat feature of Docs to Go is the ability to email a document directly from within the application seamlessly via the gmail client making transfer of files between your Android device and… well… anywhere, completely painless. To transfer a file to your device it’s simply a case of reversing the process. Just email your doc(x) or xls(x) document to your Gmail account and you’ll find that clicking on the ‘preview’ button opens the file directly in the Docs to Go application where it can be edited or saved to your SD card. Nifty.

Summary
Documents to Go for Android isn’t perfect  – a PDF viewer and Powerpoint functionality would be a welcome addition and $20 is a lot for an Android app. So far there’s no real support for the soft keyboard and there’s a need for the ability to jump to individual pages in a document (or similar scrolling acceleration to that found in the Android browser) since scrolling through long documents can be a real pain. Our real niggle though is the implementation of some of the edit functions. There’s no support for the long press method of accessing the edit menu or for keyboard shortcuts using the menu button. These omissions are baffling and make using select, cut and paste functions unnecessarily unwieldy.

Having said all that though, the positives do outweigh the negatives by some margin. So much so that this is probably the best productivity application we’ve seen for Android and if you’re in the market (ahem) for an app which enables you to work on Word and Excel files when travelling light then Documents to Go is hard to beat. How often you find yourself in that position is, of course, another question. Is it worth $20 for those occasions? Definitely.

Developer web site: www.dataviz.com
Price: $19.99
Availability: Downloadable from the Android market with 24hr money back guarantee

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