Office Blues

I've had some problems settling on an office suite for my Zodiac.

For a long time, I'd bounced between WordSmith and Documents To Go.
WordSmith was the better pure word processor, but now that I'm doing
independent consulting, I find more need for Excel and yes, even
PowerPoint. Moreover, now that I'm connected once again, the ability to
save and send files as native Office documents others can read is an
important feature; I don't want to have to go home and sync before I send a
document to someone. Kinda defeats the purpose of being mobile.

So I decided to shelve WordSmith. But before installing Documents To Go, I
tried an experiement. I installed QuickOffice.

This goes back to the Open Standards thing I just posted about. QuickOffice
seemed to have two major advantages over Documents To Go:

1. While both suites can open and save native Word and Excel documents,
Documents To Go can only open Native Powerpoint, and this only in Documents
To Go 7, which seemed in past testing to be more unstable on my Zodiac than
version 6. QuickOffice and open and save PowerPoint files.

2. QuickOffice can also save files in HTML format, the ultimate in document
portability. In a lot of ways, QuickOffice is more an HTML editor than word
processor, even giving you the ability to edit the code directly rather
than WYSIWYG.

Unfortunately, QuickOffice didn't make the grade. It installed fine, and
though the desktop component for adding files to the handheld isn't as nice
as Documents To Go, it's still far better than WordSmith's. But once I had
documents on the handheld, I noticed the formatting looked... odd.

My fiction is formatted in Word the way you'd expect fiction to look. No
open block paragraphs. First line indented, full justified. In QuickOffice,
everything just ran together. Paragraphs weren't separated a la HTML, nor
were they indented. A look at the underlying HTML showed why. QuickOffice
has essentially no paragraph formatting support at all. Or more to the
point, while it carries over style information embedded in the HTML, it
doesn't respect it. The document probably would have looked okay back on
the desktop, but it was a jumbled mess on the handheld.

If the underlying code had been good, I probably could have dealt with
that. After all, I don't need it to look pretty, I need it to be
well-structured. Well, QuickOffice falls short here, too. In a new
document, with double returns to force block paragraphs, a look at the
underlying HTML shows the document to be enclosed in one giant P tag, with
two BR tags setting off each paragraph. If I wanted HTML that bad, I'd use
Word '97.

So I'm left with Documents To Go again. No open standards (sigh) but at
least I have something that can email readable documents to others. I just
have to assume they have Office, but that's pretty safe assumption these
days. But again, a question. 6 or 7?

I crossed my fingers and installed 7. I really like the ability to read
PowerPoint documents, and the customizable toolbar. Beforehand, though, I
removed everything from my Zodiac that wasn't strictly necessary. Gone went
TealScript (I'm now forcing myself to learn Graffiti 2, southpaw-unfriendly
though it is) and gone went Fonts4OS5. PToolSet is gone. So are most of my
games. (Everything was copied to an SD card before deletion, so all that's
really gone are preference settings, should I decide to reinstall on the
road.)

And so far, no glitches. Documents To Go 7 is humming along just fine, and
I can email documents to anyone I want.

Now if DataViz would just put well-formed xHTML and CSS support in
Documents To Go 8, I'll be happy.