Office Documents on Palm and Pocket PC

Now, Office Documents Look Better on Palms Than on Pocket PCs
ne advantage Pocket PC hand-held devices are supposed to hold over the Palm variety is that, because their software is designed by Microsoft, they can view, create and edit Microsoft Office documents, while Palms can’t. But this isn’t exactly true. Most Palm models, as well as the Sony Clie PDAs based on Palm’s operating system, come with an add-on program that allows them to work with Office documents.

I’ve been testing this program, Documents To Go from DataViz, and comparing it to the Pocket Word and Pocket Excel programs that come with Pocket PC hand-helds from companies like Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba and Dell.

My surprising conclusion is that, in many respects, Documents To Go does better with Office documents than Microsoft’s own PDA programs.

Documents To Go comes in several versions. The Standard edition, which comes with the Clies, handles Microsoft Word and Excel files only. The Professional edition, bundled with most Palm models, adds support for Microsoft PowerPoint files. There’s also a Premium version, with extra features, that sells for $69.95, or $29.95 as an upgrade from lesser versions.

When you buy a Palm or Sony hand-held, Documents To Go isn’t preloaded. You have to install it from the CD-ROM that comes in the box. It takes up as much as two megabytes of memory, or RAM, which can be a lot on some Palm models. By contrast, Pocket Word and Excel come preinstalled on Pocket PCs in a way that reduces their memory usage.

Documents To Go installed easily on two Palm-based PDAs I tested, a Palm Tungsten T, which comes with the program, and a Handspring Treo 300, which doesn’t. For comparison, I used a T-Mobile Pocket PC. I only tested features available in the Professional edition.

One big difference between Documents To Go Professional and the Pocket PC software is that the former handles PowerPoint files. Surprisingly, the Microsoft software doesn’t. If you buy a Pocket PC and want to work with PowerPoint files, you have to pay for a third-party add-on program or pick a Pocket PC model that includes one. Another difference: Documents To Go works on both Windows and Macintosh computers, while Microsoft’s software is Windows only.

Documents To Go creates a window on your PC into which you can drag any Office documents you want to use on your PDA. To transfer documents and synchronize any changes you make in them, you just push the Hot Sync button on your Palm cradle or cable, as usual.

The Pocket PC software creates a special folder on your PC into which you drag any Office documents you wish to transfer and synchronize. The synchronization is automatic and doesn’t require the push of a button, but I found it flakier and less reliable than Palm’s synchronization.

Both systems convert the documents to a format that’s easily viewed on the smaller hand-held screen while retaining the content and formatting. And both let you make changes on the hand-held that will be transferred to the PC version after synchronization.

I created a half-dozen typical Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents for my test. The PowerPoint documents transferred very well to the Palm using Documents To Go, and I could even add slides and make changes on the Palm that were synchronized back into the PC version, though no formatting is possible. I couldn’t test them on the Pocket PC because the built-in software doesn’t handle PowerPoint.

When I tested the Word files, Documents To Go proved clearly superior to the Pocket PC. It displayed the documents faithfully, down to the fonts, graphics, colors and tables. And when I made changes and synchronized them, the changed version on the PC retained all its original characteristics, plus the changes.

On the Pocket PC, however, the fonts were changed, and they didn’t revert back on the PC after synchronization. A table in the original turned to an incoherent mess on the hand-held. There were large areas of white space that hadn’t been present in the original, and some color text in a border on the PC document was rendered vertically on the hand-held, one character a line.

When I synchronized the documents after making changes on the Pocket PC, the mysterious white space and other oddities showed up on the PC. Pocket PC does have a spell checker that Documents To Go lacks, but its mutilation of the documents seemed to outweigh that plus.

The comparison was closer with my test Excel spreadsheets. Documents To Go rendered them fine, and allowed changes that were faithfully reproduced back on the PC. But the Pocket PC did so as well, and it offers more tools on the hand-held for formatting and arranging cells.

However, even with spreadsheets, Documents To Go had one clear advantage: It can view and even create charts on the Palm. Not only can’t the Pocket PC handle charts, but when I made changes in a spreadsheet with a chart, the charts were wiped out on the PC after synchronization.

Anyone seeking to view or edit Office documents on a PDA would do fine with a Palm-based model and Documents To Go — better, in many respects, than somebody using a Pocket PC.

E-mail me at mossberg@wsj.com.