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Quickoffice brings cloud document access and editing to Google Android

Quickoffice is the default Office document viewer on many Google Android devices and with this new version you get full editing and creation capability. They also took it a step further and give you access to several online storage repositories for easy document access and saving.
Written by Matthew Miller, Contributing Writer

I have been very happy with Documents To Go on my Google Android devices for editing, viewing, and creating Office documents over this past year. I have noticed that some of the newer Android devices I tried or owned came with a Quickoffice viewer application, but I selected DTG for the default editor. I have been writing about the Dataviz and Quickoffice competitive updates and offerings on the iPhone and iPad over the past couple of years that has pushed both programs to be excellent choices on iPhone OS devices. We are now seeing that healthy competition come to the Google Android platform with Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite. The MAJOR functionality found in Quickoffice compared to Documents To Go at this time is the support for cloud storage solutions from Google Docs, Dropbox, Box. Take a look at my video, image gallery, and initial thoughts on using the application below.


Image Gallery: You can check out some screenshots of Quickoffice on the Sprint HTC EVO 4G.
Image Gallery: Quickoffice main screen
Image Gallery: Quicksheet in landscape

Most people can probably get by with just having a document viewer on their phones, but if you are a person who gets sent documents on the go and has a need to edit them on the go then you should look at Quickoffice. There is still rather limited editing capability in the application, but even this limited functionality may satisfy many people's basic editing needs on their phone. The Sprint HTC EVO 4G is a great Android device to use with this application because of the fabulous 4.3 inch display. Office documents with file formats from 1997 through 2008 are supported in Quickoffice.

Quickword

Quickword appears to open up Word documents quite quickly and lets you jump between page view and reflow view as you try to view and edit your documents. You will find that you need to tap the Menu button quite often in the application to access functions like the keyboard, format options, search, save, and more. As I mentioned, there are limited formatting options in the current version of the application and these include bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, font type, font size, font color, and highlight color.

That is about all there is to the word processor module in Quickoffice.

Quicksheet

Excel spreadsheets look pretty fantastic on the large EVO display, especially slightly zoomed out in landscape orientation. Like the word processor module, you need to use the Menu button quite a bit to use the module. Pressing Menu lets you toggle between worksheets, toggle the keyboard, access the number format for the cell, manage cell font formats, search , and jump to cells.

Tapping and holding on a cell lets you access the font and number formats too. Double tapping on the spreadsheet enables the cell selection mode and then you simply tap elsewhere to select large blocks of text. There is a large formula/cell entry text box up top with a fx adjacent to it. I was hoping there would be a Quick selector in the function area so you could select formulas from a drop down list. You can view charts in existing spreadsheets, but you cannot create them on your Android device.

Quickpoint

You cannot create a new PowerPoint document with the software, but you can use it to open up and view edit PowerPoint files, to some extent. I ordered an HDMI cable and look forward to trying it out to see if I can control slideshows through the cable. You can view presentations in portrait or landscape, view the slideshow that advanced by itself, and scroll through slides.

PDF viewer

I have been using the Documents To Go PDF viewer for PDF attachments, but after just a few minutes with the one found in Quickoffice I think I found my new default viewer. I like the way Quickoffice has quick toggles between page view and reading view. Reading view reflows the text in your PDF document so you can read it with just vertical scrolling rather than full page vertical and horizontal scrolling. It even keeps data in tables quite well in reading view and zooms in to a very readable level. You can jump to pages quickly, conduct fast searches that will highlight search terms in green, zoom in and out, and rotate the document. It is quite a good PDF viewer.

Closing thoughts

I personally think it is great to see continued competition in the mobile Office document area and expect that Documents To Go will now integrate some of its cloud services into the Android application. Quickoffice is a good deal at $15 and performed solidly while I was using the application. Keep in mind that this version of Quickoffice currently works with Android 1.6 and later devices with a version coming to support older Android versions.

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