Looking to put your documents and spreadsheets on your PalmOS based handheld? You might put QuickOffice Pro to the test. With QuickWord, QuickSheet, and QuickPoint, Cutting Edge’s new QuickOffice Pro comes to the rescue!

QuickWord

Launching QuickWord displays a list of documents on your Palm handheld with various icons next to the names, and at the bottom of the screen is a toolbar allowing you to create a new document, open an existing document, delete, print, and beam. There are also two buttons, which allow you to select between documents in RAM or on an expansion card. You can choose to minimize the toolbar by tapping the icon in the lower right corner.

Within the default view, the document size is shown. An icon to the left of the document name opens a menu accessing several document functions including move and copy documents to memory card, export to a memo pad or Palm Doc file, duplicate, change category, compress and uncompress, and append memo. "Append memo" allows you to attach the contents of a memo pad document to the QuickWord document you are working on.

The default view is customizable via the view options in the menu. You can select the icon to display next to the document list such as the action icon, backup icon, global icon, or private icon. The action icon is enabled by default and tapping it brings up the popup menu. The backup icon toggles the backup setting of a document (this has no bearing on document syncing). The global icon allows you to include the document in the PalmOS search function, and "private" secures the document so that a password must be entered to open it. You can also select to show dates and document size. The date option displays either the document creation date or last edited date.

When a document is opened in QuickWord, you see the document with a toolbar at the bottom of the screen. Within the toolbar is a close document icon, background and foreground text colors, a font icon, paragraph alignment toggle, bulleting toggle, bold, italic, and underline toggles, a document details icon, and the find and replace icon. Paragraph alignment includes the standard, left, right, and center alignment. You can also hide the toolbar via the arrow in the lower right corner. Conveniently placed at the top of the screen are also a bookmark icon, autoscroll toggle, and a view/edit toggle.

The main menu contains several features that are not accessible via the toolbar. These include "Prepare distribution", find, find next, go to top/bottom, thesaurus, spell check selection/document, dictionary management, HTML view toggle, preferences, and about. The prepare distribution function "cleans" the document so that a doc reader considers it unread, scans for bookmarks and initializes the header so it loads faster.

QuickWord’s native format is HTML and documents can be edited as raw HTML code, or in regular WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) format. I noticed that QuickWord’s HTML formatting is not exactly efficient. Editing a document multiple times can leave redundant HTML tags, causing slower performance and large document size. The HTML also lacks support for formatting retention on the PC, which I discuss in the synchronization section.

QuickWord has support for Hires, Hires+ and Jogwheel on Sony and Handera devices. Support for hires is good, and you can import your own custom fonts, just as you can in WordSmith and Documents to Go Premium. Spell check support and thesaurus support is great, though spell checking can be a little slow, a limitation of the processor used in Palm OS devices.

QuickSheet

Just as with QuickWord, when you launch QuickSheet you arrive at a spreadsheet list, and the toolbar at the bottom of the screen. Unlike QuickWord, toolbar options include: new spreadsheet, open spreadsheet, copy, rename, delete, print, beam, and the RAM/VFS toggle. In order to move a spreadsheet to memory card you must use the menu.

When you open a spreadsheet you are taken to a hires view of the spreadsheet, below which is the cell editor, formatting dropdown toggle, function dropdown toggle, and scroll arrows. At the top of the page is another dropdown, allowing selection of other worksheets inside your spreadsheet.

As one would expect, QuickSheet supports cell formatting. Cell text formatting consists of decimal, text, currency, scientific, percent, date, and time as well as foreground and background colors, left, center, and right alignment of text, bold and underlined text, commas, and locked cells. Font size can be changed, but not in individual cells. There are four fonts to choose from. QuickSheet also has style profiles, allowing you to specify settings for quick formatting of cells. Just as in QuickWord, QuickSheet has HiRes and HiRes+ support for Sony and Handera and jog wheel support.

QuickSheet’s function support is outstanding with over 75 available functions, however sheets that utilize many functions can take awhile to recalculate. This is due to the limited processor performance in Palm OS devices. Auto recalculating can be turned off in the properties, and this will speed performance. Within chart properties you can also toggle the grid display, sheet backup, template, server syncing, and use buttons. Template mode saves formatting in a spreadsheet even for empty cells. Server syncing allows you to sync via a HotSync server. When this is selected the spreadsheet will not sync locally to a PC. The Use buttons option enables the AddressBook and ToDo buttons to scroll inside a spreadsheet horizontally without having to tap the scroll buttons. Very handy!

QuickChart

QuickChart enables the charting and graphing of your spreadsheets and is accessible as a function within QuickSheet. Add a chart to your spreadsheet by selecting the cell in which you want it to appear. Simply choose the range for the chart data, and enter the chart into the spreadsheet. To access the chart and its properties, double tap the cell with the chart function.

Charts can be synchronized with the PC. When viewed in Excel, the cell with the chart function is there, but cannot be edited or the chart will not sync back with the Palm.

Chart support is pretty similar to that in Documents to Go. Choices include line, bar, pie, scatter, and stock charts. Charts draw quickly for the most part, however QuickChart doesn’t support Sony hires, so a pie chart took a rather long time to draw. Everything else worked fine however.

Synchronization

Synchronization is accomplished via the QuickOffice Desktop conduit. To the very left of the screen you can select between QuickSheet, QuickWord, or QuickPoint documents. Next to this is a category list and to the right of this is the list of documents in the sync queue. Via the toolbar or menu within QuickOffice Desktop, you can add or delete documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. When installing QuickOffice, menus are also added to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint to add documents to the sync queue directly. From within QuickOffice desktop you can jump to Word, Excel, or PowerPoint to view the file without having to locate it via Windows Explorer. Categories can be managed through the file menu. If you’re looking to spice up QuickOffice desktop, you can also choose one of seven available themes. This is a nice touch, but not quite enough to polish a less than perfect synchronization system.

The synchronization system in QuickOffice Pro could use a bit of improvement, especially when it comes to format retention, which doesn’t exist at all. When a word documents with tables and pictures in set to sync with QuickWord, these unsupported items will be removed entirely. In fact, because there is no document retention, when a file is added into the synchronization queue in QuickOffice Pro, it is copied over to the QuickOffice folder. Linking the file is an option, but is not an option available within the Word or Excel save function. This means that a separate copy of the file you want to sync with QuickOffice is made. Any changes made to the document are only made to the copy that QuickOffice Desktop has. The linking makes up for this, but without format retention you would have to keep a backup of your file anyway.

QuickOffice Pro also includes a Font Converter for converting desktop fonts into fonts that QuickWord can use and view. These can be managed and viewed within the FontBucket utility. Average size for a font can vary, and can be 100-200KBs in size.

QuickPoint

QuickPoint is what separates QuickOffice Professional from QuickOffice Premium. QuickPoint allows you to view PowerPoint slides on your PDA and edit notes associated with slides. QuickPoint requires PowerPoint 2000 or XP, and has only limited support for PowerPoint 97.

Upon launch of QuickPoint you arrive at the presentation menu. Here you can choose a presentation to view, delete, print, beam or email. As with the rest of QuickOffice, presentations can be stored on external memory.

When a slide is first opened you arrive at the outline view by default. At the bottom of the screen are icons for the views, zoom and scrolling. Available slide views are similar to that of PowerPoint; full slide view, outline view, multiple slide or thumbnail view, and notes view.

In the main slide view the size of the slide is determined by how it was imported into QuickOffice. Different resolutions are available, and you can also set the number of colors each slide displays. Within QuickPoint slides can be displayed in actual size, or "fit screen" size, through the zoom icons on the toolbar. Full screen display is toggled by tapping on the slide, command V, or through the view menu. Slides can also be annotated, or drawn upon by toggling annotations through the view menu, or command G.

As in PowerPoint, outline view displays the contents of each slide, and the multiple slide view displays thumbnails of each slide in the presentation. By tapping the slide you are taken to the full view. Within note view you again see a thumbnail of the slide, and a text box below containing the slide notes. Slide notes are synced to the desktop.

QuickPoint also supports a feature called Pitch. This is an adapter that allows you to connect your Palm to a LCD projector and display full size, full resolution slides. For more information on Pitch, see http://www.quickoffice.com/pitch/.

Just as with the rest of QuickOffice, QuickPoint offers hires and font support. It is, however, somewhat limited. Hires support is used in the main view and the outline views only. On the N760C used to review QuickPoint, I had to add the program to my lowres app list to get the thumbnail view to display correctly. Font support is only used in the outline and note view, which really doesn't serve any purpose.

QuickPoint is also very slow at loading slides, especially in the main view. There is a progress bar to display loading status. This is something I am sure the 66mhz devices are better at, but 16mhz users are in for a wait.

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