MS Office document woes on Android

[groston]

I am trying to find an app for my TF700T tablet that will be able to manage MS Office documents in a reasonable manner. Thus far, the two I have tried, did quite poorly.

• Polaris Office: Changed my two page .docx file into three pages and screwed up various aspects of a .pptx file.
• KingSoft Office: Changed my two page .docx file into four pages (along with a pile of other problems) and screwed up my .ptx file even worse than Polaris Office.
• Documents to Go (3.0 - free) makes the others look good by comparison. It totally hosed the .docx file, but did not screw up the .pptx as badly as the others.
• Olive Office: Thus far, this is the worst. Did not handle screen orientation properly, completely hosed the .docx file and could not open the .pptx file.
• ThinkFree Office Viewer: Mangled the .docx file - made it five pages long, but the appearance was OK. Did the best (so far) with the .pptx file. Seems to require more permissions than needed, in particular, why does it need to read logs and contacts?
• QuickOffice Pro HD: The .docx file would up on three pages, but looked mostly OK. The .pptx had issues - both in terms of mangling the file and the program's behaving weirdly - the screen was flashing, etc.
• Smart Office: The interface for this program is quite unusual - and not in a good way. It mangled the .docx (making it four pages). The .pptx was not too bad, but the lite version of this program is useless as it only properly displays the first few pages.
• OfficeSuite: Not sure why this program needs access to accounts. Mangled the .docx file, especially in included Excel table. Did OK with the .pptx, but failed to display an embedded Excel table.

I am beginning to believe that this is inevitable, since Office files do not embed fonts, thus the look/spacing will be different. The same issue may also apply to OLE items (like spreadsheets). Is this a reasonable assumption? If not, are there any apps which will preserve the actual document formatting, colors, etc?

My conclusion (now having tested just about every app out there): None of them are good, some are worse than others. Use a free one, but do not expect to do anything more than view documents. These apps cannot be trusted to manage documents properly.

Thank you.

 

[mikedt]

I am trying to find an app for my TF700T tablet that will be able to manage MS Office documents in a reasonable manner. Thus far, the two I have tried, did quite poorly.

• Polaris Office: Changed my two page .docx file into three pages and screwed up various aspects of a .pptx file.
• KingSoft Office: Changed my two page .docx file into four pages (along with a pile of other problems) and screwed up my .ptx file even worse than Polaris Office.
• Documents to Go (3.0 - free) makes the others look good by comparison. It totally hosed the .docx file, but did not screw up the .pptx as badly as the others.
• Olive Office: Thus far, this is the worst. Did not handle screen orientation properly, completely hosed the .docx file and could not open the .pptx file.
• ThinkFree Office Viewer: Mangled the .docx file - made it five pages long, but the appearance was OK. Did the best (so far) with the .pptx file. Seems to require more permissions than needed, in particular, why does it need to read logs and contacts?
• QuickOffice Pro HD: The .docx file would up on three pages, but looked mostly OK. The .pptx had issues - both in terms of mangling the file and the program's behaving weirdly - the screen was flashing, etc.
• Smart Office: The interface for this program is quite unusual - and not in a good way. It mangled the .docx (making it four pages). The .pptx was not too bad, but the lite version of this program is useless as it only properly displays the first few pages.
• OfficeSuite: Not sure why this program needs access to accounts. Mangled the .docx file, especially in included Excel table. Did OK with the .pptx, but failed to display an embedded Excel table.

I am beginning to believe that this is inevitable, since Office files do not embed fonts, thus the look/spacing will be different. The same issue may also apply to OLE items (like spreadsheets). Is this a reasonable assumption? If not, are there any apps which will preserve the actual document formatting, colors, etc?

I'm sure that is the problem, If a document is using a font that's specific to Windows or MS Office, it's not going to show in any Android office app. MS Office does come with a lot of fonts, that are not usually available anywhere else.

Stick to Times New Roman, Arial and Courier and you should be OK.

Forget Mongolian Script on Android as well.

No chance.

My conclusion (now having tested just about every app out there): None of them are good, some are worse than others. Use a free one, but do not expect to do anything more than view documents. These apps cannot be trusted to manage documents properly.

Thank you.

That's my conclusion as well, unless you're doing something really basic, the current crop of Android office apps just can't cut it. If a PPT has any form of scripting or interactivity, like Jeopardy games, they just don't work in Android office apps. Formulae and graphing in Excel spreadsheets are often a problem as well. Apple's iWork on iOS is pretty good, but even that can't do all the MS Office stuff.