Writing On Your Palm

Documents a Go Go

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30 October, 2000

The Palm will not go quietly.

DataViz recently released version 3 of Documents To Go, a program that until recently was useful only for viewing Word and Excel documents while on the road. Version 3 allows editing, WYSIWYG editing at that. "Round tripping" Office documents is now a viable possibility, without losing formatting. Finally, real word processing on the Palm.

Sort of. But I'll pick nits later.

Installation is easy, remarkably so. You install Documents To Go, it installs the Palm applications and the conduit, and you're off to the races. Once everything's installed, you just drag and drop your Office documents into Documents To Go, hotsync, and the conduit quickly and cleanly converts (and compresses) your documents.

On the Palm, you have an application called Documents. Open it and you'll see your Office documents and their new file sizes. Open a Word document and you'll see the closest approximation possible given the font limitations of the PalmOS (you still only have two font sizes to pick from, and obviously they're both sans serif). Text alignment, font properties (italics, underlining, etc.) and lists are all preserved and properly displayed.

From here, you can make any changes or alteration that you need, within reason. You can change font size, justification and formatting. You can't create new bulleted lists, but you can modify the ones that already exist.

This is a recurring theme in Documents To Go. The entire interface assumes most of what you need in the document was already there when you synced it over from Word on the desktop. There is no "new" button, for example. You're not expected to create new documents from scratch on the Palm. You can work around this by using templates, blank, pre-created documents that you create on the desktop, sync, open in Documents To Go and then immediately Save As..., but I really don't think DataViz expects people to do this.

And if you do try to create a document from a blank template, be patient. Documents To Go has a fairly obtuse interface. There are no toolbars or command shortcuts to get to the font formatting functions, for example. If you want to make a word bold, you have to select it with the stylus, tap Menu, tap Edit, tap Font, then tap the Bold checkbox in the pop up dialog. Also, keyboard response in Documents To Go is abysmal, and it gets slower the deeper you are into the document. If you try to type near the end of the novel-length document, your batteries will probably die before the Palm responds again. (Well, maybe it's not that bad, but it ain't good.) The program is pretty snappy if you limit yourself to using just the stylus, though.

Add it all up and you have a program that works great... for what it was designed to do. Documents To Go is intended to take documents that you already have on your desktop and make minor alterations to them when you're away from your desk. It is not a full-blown word processor, and anyone looking to create longish documents from scratch on the Palm is better off sticking with pedit, TakeNote, etc. Documents To Go is obviously meant to fall in line with Palm, Inc.'s strategy of using the handheld as a peripheral of the desktop PC rather than a stand-alone computer. In that role, it's a great way to carry your Excel and Word documents, and make an occasional correction. For those of you looking for powerful and easy word processing and spreadsheets on the Palm, stick with TakeNote and QuickSheet.