With more and more Nokia smartphones having either full keyboards or good enough touchscreens to allow fast typing, you may be tempted to try doing some proper work on your phone. Office Suite 5 is an app that will let you open and edit common office file formats (such as MS Word, Excel and RTF) on your phone. Find out how well it stacks up on the Nokia N97 with our Office Suite 5 review...
Although not the only office app available for Symbian phones, the latest release, Office Suite 5 brings something new - the ability to edit files stored in the Google Docs cloud. Version 5 is available for both S60 3rd edition and 5th edition (touch) handsets.
The word processor component is basic, but you can edit rich text, alter fonts and formatting and spellcheck in 6 languages. More importantly, the app can open MS Word documents with ease - including, as of version 5, DOCX and XLSX files from MS Office 2007. As a bonus, we found that the word processor makes a pretty serviceable ebook reader - certainly as good as the others currently available for S60 phones.
The spreadsheet side of things is a little more awkward. Editing individual cells takes multiple taps or clicks to select a cell, then go into edit mode, then save the cell. It's ok for quick changes, but the thought of creating a spreadsheet from scratch with this thing fills us with dread. You can create fairly complex function, however and the tools are all there - it is just that the interface is a bit clumsy. For viewing sheets created on a PC, things are a bit brighter - you can plot charts and graphs, lock rows and columns, etc. just as you would on a desktop.
Don't be under any illusions - you won't be able to bang out super-complex Excel documents packed with pivot tables, nor will you be doing much in the way of desktop publishing. If you want basic viewing and editing, though, Office Suite 5 is more than adequate. The ability to access files via Google Docs is a big win, enabling you to work on documents using a PC and then carry on editing them via wifi with only a small difference in functionality.
If you need to work on the move, but don't want to lug a laptop around, Office Suite 5 is worth a look, just don't plan on writing War & Peace or proving Fermat's Last Theorem.
Details
Price: €19.99 (30-day free trial with nag screens and saving to Google Docs disabled)
Size: 4MB
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