Reviews
Quickoffice
for Symbian
Microsoft Office documents on your UIQ communicator or
Series 60 smartphone
There
is a long tradition of third party software bridging the gap between
non-Microsoft handheld computers and Microsoft Office documents.
Quickoffice has been in this category for Palm OS machines for
years, so ther expertise they bring to the Symbian-powered space
is formidable ÷ they know how to shoehorn piles of chunky, complex
documents into tiny, low-powered handhelds with dinky screens.
It's
a sobering indication of the monopolistic power of Microsoft to
make it so that we need to do this at all. Surely there are more
appropriate file formats suitable for the small screen, but we'll
never know. It's on seemingly everyone's handheld selection checklist:
Word? Check. Excel? Check.
What about
PowerPoint, you say? Well, it's a bit less common for folks to
want to drag around presentations with them, but there is a market.
Quickoffice for Series 60 (like my Nokia 6600, for example) smartphones
supports the .PPT format, while the UIQ version (Sony Ericsson
P900, to name another personal fave) does not currently support
PowerPoint. Honestly, I cannot imagine why anyone 
would
want to view, edit, or ÷egads! ÷ actually present their slides
using a two or three inch display, but somebody out there obviously
does and more power to Îem, I say.
Far more useful
in this email-obsessed modern day we live in is the ability to
read and write Word and Excel files that so often arrive as attachments.
Sure, they clog up our inboxes and run up our T-Mobile bills,
but in a good way. Like it or not, these formats are the lingua
franca of text and 
numbers
arranged in an orderly fashion. Many an email arrives with nothing
more than a cursory description of the attached Word document;
Excel files often show up with no introduction at all from my
editor. This is just the way we do business in the early 21st
century.
If you're
going to attempt to work with complex desktop documents on a Symbian
handheld, be realistic in your expectations and things will go
much better for you. Really hairy Word files with annotations,
footnotes, embedded graphics and spreadsheets, and so on, will
often simply blow up. Even if you can open them, they won't ãround-tripä,
which is the process of moving a file from one platform to another,
changing it, then bringing it back intact. Simpler files with
a few basic 
fonts
and common formatting will round-trip pretty darn reliably, and
ordinary spreadsheets will do the same. But if you are determined
to do pivot table operations, database analysis, or multi-sheet
linking, forget it. You are using a claw hammer to do a pile driver's
job.
Thankfully,
the vast majority of documents people pass around fall into the
broad category Quickoffice can handle with little drama. When
you think about it, it is amazing that you can read these pudgy
files on your smartphone at all.
öDavid
MacNeill
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