Review: Documents To Go (Series 80)
Score:
78%
Version Reviewed: 2.00(22)
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It’s natural to want to be able to open and edit Microsoft Office documents on your device. Both Series 60 and UIQ devices require a third party office solution, either sourced independently or bundled by the handset manufacturer. Documents To Go, from DataViz, has long been the standard bundled solution for Palm OS, and has successfully made the transition to Symbian OS. On the UIQ platform it has a competitor in the QuickOffice suite, but the latest Documents To Go release for Series 80 has a clear run as the only third party office suite available to install.
Just one small thing stands in the way - all Series 80 devices already have a built-in Word Processor and Spreadsheet application.
The first question, why bother, is an obvious one. And there’s a very simple answer to this. DataViz reckons that the built-in applications which convert from MS-Word and MS-Excel to its own (Symbian/EPOC) formats and then export them back again when saving, aren’t much cop. And they’re right. When using the built-in applications, a huge amount of formatting information is lost in the round trip from PC to smartphone and back to the PC. Which is fine if you’re doing notes for yourself, but it’s a huge problem if you’re editing a document that has been emailed to you from a colleague at work. Imagine sending it back with a note saying “Can you cut and paste the tables back in? And the colours. And some lines…”
One thing to note about Documents To Go is that, in the Symbian way, the engine of the application is separate from the User Interface. This means that the snappily titled “InTact Technology,” which DataViz has created, does cope with a multitude of formatting elements in MS-Word and MS-Excel documents. Rather than go over what we already know, I checked our test files that we used in the Documents To Go UIQ review, and surprise, surprise, the results are the same. Over to Steve for a second:
"I copied my test file back to my Windows PC and opened it (in OpenOffice, though we also tested with Microsoft Office). Astoundingly, nothing has been lost from my original file. Everything, from paragraph styles to embedded objects, from pictures to footnotes, is all present and correct. DataViz make a song and dance about this product's 'InTact Technology' and it certainly impressed me. On this trial run, I'd be quite happy to receive master Word files from my editor on the P900, carry out changes and then send them back with confidence."
Unfortunately, not everything is rosy in the Documents To Go garden. While all the underlying mechanics are as polished as you would come to expect, the user interface and controls let it down.
Word To Go
Firstly, this looks almost like the built-in Word application – the (side) command buttons have changed, but that’s about it. And while I can see from a practical point of view that following the Series 80 style guide slavishly would be a sensible thing, it means that any chance to really stand out on presentation is lost.
Of course, DataViz might be angling to have Documents To Go replace the built-in office applications in later versions of Series 80, much as Opera replaced the initial STNC-based web browser of the 9210, but that’s not what we’re looking at here.
Based on what DataViz has done with Documents To Go for the UIQ platform so far, one can reason than this won’t be the only version of Documents To Go that DataViz will release for the Series 80. Which is good, because there are a number of areas that cry out for extra functionality to be added.
At first, moving the cursor around the screen was an absolute pain, because the 'page up' and 'page down', home and end function keys do nothing. Trying to scroll down a huge document, line by line, to find a section, as opposed to going down a page at a time, stops being fun after about half a screen. Digging into the documentation, it’s actually the control keys that you need to hold down to get page up and down functionality and not the Chr key. Given that every other application under Series 80 uses the Chr-Up/Down methodology, this would be top of my list to be changed in the next version. I’ve jumped around documents with just keyboard controls since the Psion Series 3, and these keys are hardwired into my brain.
And one of the biggest journalistic requests in the Nokia word processor, the word count option, would have been a tiny differentiate that would have got me to live with the missing/rewired controls. Alas that’s not here either. Fingers crossed that it makes it into the next version update.
One feature that hasn’t seemed to make it over from either MS Word or Symbian Word is the Style gallery. This is effectively a macro feature that sets up all the fonts, sizes, emphases, colourings and layout for a paragraph (for example, a Heading, a Sub Heading and a Paragraph would each have their own style). You’re going to have to set each of these manually when working in Documents To Go. It’s not all bad though. The inclusion of document comments, footnotes and endnotes is welcomed, and just the sort of thing you need when passing documents back and forward via email.
Sheet To Go
Sheet To Go feels to be a bit more rounded than Word To Go; there are less niggles and small features missing in the interface. There’s also a little less that needs to be fiddled with in terms of formatting in the average spreadsheet (than Word-based documentation). What is nice is the True-Type font usage in Sheet To Go (and Word To Go as well) which is especially noticeable when you zoom down to smaller fonts. If I have one problem with the standard Series 80 Office suite, it’s the lack of small fonts. So the mix of small fonts and zooming out to a sensible level in Documents To Go is very much welcome.
One thing I did find missing in the Sheet To Go application is the ability to display your sheet data in the form of a graph. Looking at a nice bar graph representation of numeric data is a great way to get information over – especially important if you’re passing round a small PDA sized device in a group. It was the killer feature when Symbian OS was called SIBO and ran on the Psion Series 3 some fifteen years ago, and it’s still mightily impressive on the 9500. Yet it seems to be missing from Sheet To Go, even though charting options are available in MS-Excel.
Conclusion
Documents To Go is very impressive – it might seem a basic function to read Microsoft Office formatted documents, edit them, and send them back without corrupting a bundle of features, but Symbian and now Nokia have never seemed to be able to get it completely right. For round-tripping alone, anyone using a 9500 or 9300 should have Documents To Go installed.
The one caveat in all of this is that I still prefer the built-in Office apps for document creation, because both Word To Go and Sheet To Go are missing one or two crucial features. If DataViz continues to drive the Series 80 version forward, they need to make sure that every feature and option in the built-in applications is available in their version, and then add in the oft-requested features (such as word count). I’d still strongly recommend Documents To Go for Series 80, but with a little note saying that “improvements should be forthcoming.”
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at