Carry your Office in your Palm
Written: Dec 21 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Easy to use, powerful, came free with m505
Cons: Pricey (retail), limited font support, no editing of PowerPoint
The Bottom Line: Documents to Go is a good (not great) but expensive suite of applications for the mobile professional
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| morituri's Full Review: DataViz Documents to Go |
Note: This review was written and edited with Word To Go and Microsoft Word 2000.
While the Palm PDA is a very powerful tool out of the box, at times there is a need to store, view and edit large documents on the move. Desktop To Go (DTG) allows Palm users to easily interact with a variety of document formats.
I received a copy of Documents To Go Professional 3.0 for free with my Palm m505. I found out that I could upgrade the latest version (4.0, build 285) for free, by faxing in the proof of purchase (sales receipt) to Dataviz. Two days later, I received an email with instructions to download.
What’s included?
DTG is made up of 3 standard “office suite” applications, namely word processing, spreadsheet and presentation. They are:
1. Word To Go – compatible with MSWord, WordPerfect, Lotus Word Pro, TEXT and DOC formats
2. Sheet To Go- compatible with MS Excel, Quattro Pro, Lotus 1-2-3
3. Slideshow To Go – compatible with MS PowerPoint
There is an optional add-on kit with the following applications:
4. PDF To Go – PDF format Viewer
5. DataViz Mail - email client with support for Outlook, Outlook Express and Lotus Notes and also handles attachments
Since I did not order the add-on kit, I will not comment on these last two applications.
Desktop Component
Dataviz has developed DocSync Technology, which allows you to view and edit documents on the Palms with no loss in formatting. In practice, this works quite well. The user interface for DTG Desktop application is very easy to learn and use. Basically, you can just drag and drop documents to the application. You are then presented with an option to create editable or non-editable documents for the Palm. The documents are then converted, compressed and synchronized with the Palm. Any changes, either the desktop or the Palm version of the file, will be automatically identified and synchronized. The process is the same regardless of the original format of the document.
Word To Go
Word To Go is a fairly competent document viewer and editor. There are limited text formatting functions – you have access to Bold, Italic and Underline, plus text colour. However, you can’t change the font to Arial, Tahoma, etc. Word To Go also preserves indents (tabs), bullets and tables. The Palm DOC format support is a bit clunky. DOC files are not recognized automatically, so you have to add them manually on the Palm.
Sheet To Go
At first glance, Sheet To Go looks just like Excel. It’s almost as powerful, too. Sheet To Go can support huge spreadsheet sizes (up to 8192 rows, 256 columns and 64 sheets) and over a hundred functions. However, it is doubtful that many people will use all of the features. The small size of the Palm screen (160x160 characters) makes it difficult to view and digest a big spreadsheet. Sheet To Go really works best with smaller, simpler sheets such as price, inventory, customer or employee lists.
Slideshow To Go
This PowerPoint viewer has limited functionality compared to the other two applications. There are no editing functions. You can view a presentation in outline, slide show, and notes pages formats. There is only one zoom level, but it is sufficient to allow you to see all the details. Slideshow To Go will allow you to review or rehearse your presentations, but not make last minute changes.
Summary and Alternatives
All in all, DTG is great if you need to view or review documents on the road. If you need to do heavy text processing or word processing, there are better (and cheaper!) alternatives such as WordSmith and QuickWord. If you need to do spreadsheets, there are also several options such as TinySheet and QuickSheet. Adobe has a free PDF viewer for the Palm. As for email, there are several to choose from, for example Palm’s MultiMail Pro and Eudora’s Internet Suite (which is free).
With a retail price of $49.95 (Standard Edition, Word and Sheet only) and $69.95 (DTG Pro), I definitely would not have bought DTG off the shelf.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
morituri
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Reviews written: 9
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