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MS Excel and formulas

P

PicardPrime

Lurker
Hi All,

I could use some help with an application. I work for an organization that heavily relies upon MS Excel and most of our excel files contain drop-down menus and and fairly detailed formulas (totals/sums, countif, time summary, etc).

Our files are kept on a Win2k8R2 server that we are accessing from our Galaxy 10.1 tabs. The issue we are having is that when we copy the files from the server to the tablets, most (if not all) of the formulas do not transfer over, and neither do the drop down menus...thus making the document worthless. there are times that we can not work directly off of our server, so being able to edit/save/send the excel files is a must.

Can anyone point me in the direction of an app (free or paid) that will read/maitain the existing formulas? to date I have tried the built-in Office Pro HD, Documents to Go, Google Docs, Kingsoft Office, and Office Suite Pro (all paid versions) with no luck.

Thanks,
 
There's a public beta of SoftMaker Office for Android. you can get it here. It is good until the end of April I believe. You do need to register email to get registration code to activate the beta.

Visit their forums to leave feedback, suggestions and bug reports.
 
I'll give it a shot, and see if my husband is interested, since he has a fairly involved spreadsheet on his Palm to track car stuff.
 
NeoGrandizer said:
There's a public beta of SoftMaker Office for Android. you can get it here. It is good until the end of April I believe. You do need to register email to get registration code to activate the beta.

Visit their forums to leave feedback, suggestions and bug reports.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that one. :) Giving it a try today. No formulae in spreadsheets on Android office apps has been a problem for me as well.

I can't understand why there are seemingly no maths functions in these mobile spreadsheet apps. Surely doing sums is a basic feature of a spreadsheet application?

Also support for Chinese has been a problem for me with mobile presentation (Powerpoint type) apps as well. Chinese text (hanzi) is often corrupted and unreadable in PPTs when viewed with mobile presentation apps. I will be evaluating this as well. Problem seems to be is that Chinese, Japanese and Korean are all lumped together in one font with Android.

Android support for International Phonetic Alphabet(IPA) characters is extremely incomplete and broken as well, even with ICS.

There's NO support at all for Mongolian Script in documents. I teach in a Mongolian middle school.

I'm currently using MS Office on a Win7 UMPC for my work. What's available on Android is not really suitable for my office productivity uses at the moment. Hopefully it will get better and more suitable for my particular productivity requirements.
 
Actually, I think people wanting things 'simplified' being one of the main reasons why we have simple apps that are not overly complex or robustly functional. Because in all honesty, this version of SoftMaker is a neutered version compared to the WM version. I mean, I can do so much more in WM's SoftMaker that I can't find on Android version. Example: style formats, headers, footnotes, etc. Basically WM version was literally carrying the desktop counterpart with you.

The developer said they got complaints about menus being too long, navigating them, etc from users. So it looks like people looking for simplicity (sacrificing functions/features) caused this neutering on the Android version. I can honestly hope they don't charge the same price as the WM version ($80 USD/$40 USD upgrade - and well worth it) because you are losing some functions/features on the Android version.
 
Ah, finally a spreadsheet app that has decent formula entry support (too bad it makes me manually enter the data range though).

Now, if we could just get a spreadsheet that could render bar/line charts predictably we might be getting somewhere (and by rendered predictably, I don't mean rendered as a giant white square with nothing in it).
 
beallpatrick said:
Ah, finally a spreadsheet app that has decent formula entry support (too bad it makes me manually enter the data range though).

Now, if we could just get a spreadsheet that could render bar/line charts predictably we might be getting somewhere (and by rendered predictably, I don't mean rendered as a giant white square with nothing in it).
Click to expand...

Why not pop the suggestion of what you want in their beta forums? If they can work on and implement it, I'm sure they will do it. It wouldn't hurt.
 
beallpatrick said:
Ah, finally a spreadsheet app that has decent formula entry support (too bad it makes me manually enter the data range though).

Now, if we could just get a spreadsheet that could render bar/line charts predictably we might be getting somewhere (and by rendered predictably, I don't mean rendered as a giant white square with nothing in it).
Click to expand...

Thing is, I'm often reading about "post PC era" in tech blogs, although it sounds like a phrase Apple might have used. However this is the kind of thing that they've got to get sorted with mobile office productivity apps before that can happen IMO. This is in addition to what I posted earlier.

Presumably the forthcoming Windows 8 on tablets with MS Office will have complete functionality and not neutered in any way, plus what's available on Android will get better in this regard.
 
I am developing an Excel Viewer app for Android that will support any Excel file in the app with user friendly viewing capabilities and features like Charting, Annotation etc.

Should I focus only on MS Excel viewer (skip the editor since its a crowded market?), the app may cater to users who have a need to only view Excel sheets everyday (MIS Team, Middle and Senior Managers for decision making).

The app could be used to view, analyze and collaborate on the Excel. Some nice features for viewing, first level analyzing and collaborating???

Do you see a market here?
 
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