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QuickOffice
October 30, 2001
QuickOffice installation is pretty straightforward, so I won’t cover it in detail here. Once you sync your Palm after installation, you’ll see new icons for QuickWord, QuickSheet, and QuickChart. QuickWord is your word processing program, which I’ll cover in more detail in just a moment. QuickSheet is your Microsoft Excel compatible spreadsheet, and QuickChart is the application you’ll use to chart and graph your spreadsheet data in order to get the “big picture.” When you put them all together, they form a complete office suite for your Palm, taking up about 500K of space on your handheld device.
QuickWord is the application that I spent the most time with, since I’m drawn to words rather than numbers for some reason. I used it to take notes in class, and even to write this review, and I’m suitably impressed. While it doesn’t have quite so many features as the current Palm-OS word processing heavyweight, WordSmith, it doesn’t take up nearly so much room either. You can have almost the entire QuickOffice Suite in the same space that WordSmith alone takes up, without a spreadsheet. QuickWord is very nimble and quick, and has a gratifying number of features. Some of my favorites include excellent formatting and color support. While you won’t be able to change the font of the text and have it show up on your handheld (though it will work on the desktop), you can change its attributes, such as point size, bold, underline, and italics, and you can also change the color of the text to make it stand out better. The interface is also very well thought out, with the formatting icons on the tool bar very closely resembling what you’d expect to see on the desktop.
Other important things to note include the fact that QuickWord can import Palm DOCs and read them, allowing you to ditch your normal DOC reader if you would like to save some application storage space. Be advised though that Palm DOCs end up just a tad bigger than when they started; my example was 129K as a Palm DOC, and 139K as a QuickWord document. A small difference, but one that should be pointed out. QuickWord also includes an autoscroll feature so that you don’t have to use the stylus or press a single button while you’re reading.
It’s Office XP compatible and tables are fully supported, though not necessarily in the way that you may think. Information in tables is broken down by row and is not presented in table format. But you can easily edit anything that you like— once you sync the document back to your computer, you’ll find that the changes have all been made in the appropriate places, and that all of your formatting was completely preserved— margins, cell spacing, everything. That’s something that even WordSmith can’t do right now— you can view tables, but not edit the information contained within them.
But the most interesting and compelling feature for me is QuickWord’s HTML support. Since I’m always writing on the go, it’s been something of a pain to have to write my articles and then add the HTML code when I get back to the desktop. With QuickWord, I can use standard HTML tags, and when I turn off the viewing of the code, I’ll see what the document will really look like on my site before I post it, instead of uploading the review and then finding out that one missed character completely threw off the formatting that I was trying to implement. This one feature alone is enough to recommend QuickWord to anyone that regularly writes for publication on the web.
The QuickOffice Desktop has received an enormous usability upgrade. While I always found it rather difficult a few versions ago to figure out how to to make things work, the new program has been made easier to use with the addition of “Add Document” and “Delete Document” buttons. And when you add a document you are given the choice of linking the handheld file to a document on your computer, or else you can make a separate copy for your handheld. If you choose to make a copy, changes you make on the handheld are uploaded to the copy instead of to the original file.
QuickSheet has also been improved, but the changes here aren’t quite so dramatic. I’ve long considered QuickSheet to be the best spreadsheet available for the Palm OS, and that opinion hasn’t changed. If you want plenty of functions, quick calculations, great formatting and color support, and seamless integration with Microsoft Excel, QuickSheet is all you need. And QuickChart is truly amazing. Sometimes the numbers don’t tell the whole story, and what you need is a chart or a graph to make your point or help you to see the data in a new way. You want pie charts, scatter plots, bar plots, and even line plots of trigonometric functions? QuickChart will do the job.
QuickOffice would make an excellent addition to anyone’s handheld arsenal. Not only is it powerful and quick, but it is also very easy to use— it passed my patented “don’t even look at the manual that came with it” test with flying colors. And with only a couple of exceptions, QuickWord does everything that WordSmith can do (read Palm DOCs, great formatting, autoscrolling), and even a few things that it can’t (edit HTML code and tables). QuickSheet is just as great as ever, and QuickChart is superb. There’s a free trial available at the Cutting Edge Software website. And if I’ve already convinced you that you need QuickOffice, you can buy it there too for $39.95.
PocketGoddess Rating for QuickOffice: 
