OfficeSuite v5.1

If you have been looking for a  full fledged office application for  your 5800, it must have been a frustrating quest indeed. With the popular office application Quickoffice not supporting touch screen input, there are very few alternatives available in this genre. This is when I came across  OfficeSuite v5.1 from Mobisystems, an award winning office suite for s60 fifth edition devices.  The  application is a complete office suite meeting all your office requirements for a mobile client.

Installation

The application can be downloaded from the official website of Mobisystems here. Its a paid application, costing € 19.99 but a 30 day free trial is also available for free download. The installation .sisx file is around 3.5 Mb and it supports several European languages in addition to English. During the installation, the application prompts for selection of languages to be installed for dictionary support and this should be beneficial for non-English users of 5800.

Features

The application supports .doc, .xls and .ppt files along with .docx, .xlsx and .pptx, making it compatible with both versions of office files. The application can be used in two modes: view mode-for just reading the files and edit mode which is self explanatory. Users who download the trial version can continue using the application in view mode even after the trial period of 30 days.

OfficeSuite can open and edit doc, rtf and txt files while docx files can only be viewed. Other document features include spell check for 6 different languages (English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Dutch), word auto-complete, underlining of misspelled words and password protection. There are some advanced formatting options like embedding tables, images and hyperlinks but these operations are difficult to perform on our 5800s because of the lack of physical keyboard.

The application can read and edit xls, xml and csv files along with view mode for xlsx. Some of the best features of this application have to be support for charts, over 100 formulas and preservation of the orignal format after editing. Now I can edit some spreadsheets on my 5800 and after transferring them to my desktop, I can straightway start editing from where I left on 5800, without having to worry about re-aligning and other changes in formatting.

Moving over to powerpoint features: Officesuite can open and edit ppt and pps files. Some of the powerpoint features included in the application are: different view modes (slide view, slide show and notes) along with  embedding images and charts. There is a fullscreen mode but this is not exactly full screen as the soft buttons occupy some 20% of the screen space in this mode. (Check out the screenshots in the gallery below)

Pros

1. A complete office client for s60 5th edition devices
2. Most of the commonly performed tasks are supported
   

Cons

1. Some of the editing options are not easy to use on mobile devices lacking external keyboard (5800)
2. Fullscreen mode needs to get rid of the soft buttons
3. No editing for 2007 formats

Verdict

Since OfficeSuite is the only application to provide office support for 5800, there is no real scale to compare it with other applications of the same genre. However, going by the feature set it offers, its definitely one of the best office applications providing complete office solutions for s60 devices. This is one of the applications that can help you in being truly mobile by letting you work almost anywhere as long as you have your 5800 with you. At € 19.99, its more on the expensive side but the feature set do justify the pricing. If you are a workaholic working on either doc, xls and ppt for most part of your work, this application is definitely a must have on your 5800s.