Review: OfficeSuite 3
Score:
76%
Version Reviewed: 3.00
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OfficeSuite, when originally launched a couple of years ago, was a very necessary application. At the time, Quickoffice was also taking its first fledgling steps into the world of Symbian OS and hadn't really advanced that far in terms of on-device functionality. So OfficeSuite 2 was extremely welcome, bringing Inbox support, rich text display, full editing, hyperlinks, advanced spreadsheeting and zoomable displays, as demonstrated in my review, from July 2006.
So far so good. But OfficeSuite 2 had a number of rather rough edges, including screen corruption, slow screen redraws at certain spreadsheet zoom levels, an appalling spell checker and lossy round-trip performance. The software still largely worked as advertised, but the problems weren't addressed and there was always a feel of an opportunity being squandered.
Even more so now that Quickoffice 4.0 is out on the streets (see my review from Jan 2007), with slick and rock solid performance, near perfect document integrity when round-tripping, Powerpoint support and with editing facilities that rival those of OfficeSuite, albeit at the expense of fussiness over file formats and compatibility. There's no doubt that it's a serious contender now, good enough to even ship in the ROM of many Symbian-powered devices now on the streets and coming up soon.
Adding another complicating factor into the mix is Nokia/Symbian's own office suite, tweaked over the years from its roots in Psion and the Nokia Communicator, and with most Nokia Eseries devices shipping with this in the ROM. Full of features, but again fussy over file formats and sadly poorly behaved when round-tripping desktop documents.
Into this busy marketplace, enter OfficeSuite 3.0 (also for both S60 2nd Edition and 3rd Edition), new for 2007. Apart from the work needed to the work needed to bring it into line with the different screen resolutions and form factors found in the various S60 3rd Edition devices, the only significant changes are that you can now also open documents directly from your Messaging Inbox, a great convenience, and that you can create charts in the spreadsheet. Mobile Systems also claim to have fixed a number of bugs, so I put OfficeSuite 3.0 to work on my Nokia E70 and opened up my test suite of Word and Excel documents (note that there's no presentations/Powerpoint module).
You'll remember from the Quickoffice 4 review that it was very fussy over file formats, refusing to open Word files saved in non-Microsoft applications - thankfully, there's no such problem here, although my largish (300K) test document did take a full 15 seconds to open.
Scrolling through in the default view mode reveals that most content is shown correctly in place, I liked the way navigator right is used to step through a page at a time. The speed of page rendering is a little slow and the image caching could be better - scrolling to a page with images on reveals placeholders, which are then replaced with the pictures after a few seconds; if you then scroll away and then back you'll often find the placeholders back again, which is a little annoying.
You can view a document at any zoom level you like, but all levels work on all S60 3rd Edition devices in all resolutions and in portrait and landscape, making the application pretty flexible. There's a 'Go to' function, but it's limited to just 'Top' and 'Bottom', although a 'Find' function provides a way to get to some other specific point in a long document.
Opting to 'Edit' a Word document changes the menu as you'd expect, with clipboard, find/replace and formatting functions now available. A 'Word count' function is very welcome, although I missed a way of changing a paragraph's style (an omission common to all other handheld office suites, alas). You can insert images, but there's no thumbnail display within the file browser and there's no way to size them once inserted into your text.
One of v2's weakest points was its spell checker and this has sadly not been improved. Even the most trivial (correct) words aren't in its dictionary (e.g. "a" or "don't"), making it a pain to use. Another leftover from v2 is less than perfect round-tripping of Word documents, with table formatting and footnotes the main casualties.
Excel spreadsheets fare better admittedly, with all content still in place after an editing session in OfficeSuite 3. Cell editing and clipboard functions are fine, with formulae pasting successfully into highlighted ranges. The usual comprehensive set of formulae are instantly available for insertion, although there's no easy way to select cell ranges and references have to be inserted manually.
Curiously, the charts in my existing Excel workbook showed up in the main worksheet list but then weren't actually there when I went to them. Inserting a new chart in a workbook worked fine though and the default settings made for easy and quick graphs. At least until the next time I saved the workbook back on the PC in OpenOffice, at which point they became invisible within OfficeSuite again. Very strange.
The world of Office documents is undoubtedly a murky one. From the various flavours of DOC file produced by the official Microsoft suite to the (apparently) subtly different files produced by the myriad of other office tools, including the free OpenOffice, to the new formats produced by Office 2007, I don't envy the job of any corporate IT support people. As with Quickoffice 4, sticking to 'pure' Microsoft software will almost certainly produce less glitches on both PC and in smartphone, but back in the real world people will be passing around 'Office' files produced and re-saved in a variety of programs, so I don't think my tests are unrealistic.
The single biggest problem in OfficeSuite's spreadsheet module is that when you're scrolling around past the edge of the currently-displayed area (and this happens a lot when you're using a spreadsheet on a 2 inch smartphone screen), the grid is redrawn for every single keystroke used. If this was fast enough then it wouldn't be a problem, but you can physcially see the rows and columns being redrawn. On lower zoom levels (e.g. 50%), each redraw takes a full two seconds, making moving around a spreadsheet agonisingly slow.
OfficeSuite 3 is an improvement on its predecessor, for sure, but (in comparison to the massive leap forward made by competitor Quickoffice) it feels somewhat half-hearted. A trivial problem like the poorly-stocked spell checker should have been fixed by now, the spreadsheet scrolling display code has needed optimisation for ages, and there's the little matter of there not being any Powerpoint/presentations module at all. That said, OfficeSuite opened every file I threw at it, from whatever source, and allowed pretty thorough content editing, the vast majority of which made it back to the desktop, so it's not all bad news.
This is a viable office contender on the S60 3rd Edition platform, but it could be a lot better. Quickoffice took until v4 to become battle-ready, let's hope OfficeSuite 4 learns the same lessons and achieves the same status.
Steve Litchfield, 29 Jan 2007
PS. You can try OfficeSuite 3 for yourself by grabbing the 30 day trial.
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at