Office in Your Pocket

Most Palm OS applications that let you edit Microsoft Office documents share a nasty habit: They strip out any formatting they don't understand. DataViz's Documents To Go 5 Premium Edition does not, and that alone makes this microsuite worthy of handling vital business documents.

For instance, move a Word document with animated text effects into Documents' word processor, and they won't be visible. When you shuttle the edited file back into Word, however, the formatting extras are still there.

What's more, Documents' roundup of apps is the broadest of any Palm suite: It does word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, image and PDF viewing, and e-mail.

Most of the time, it handles them readily, though the features in my shipping version were a tad erratic. On the plus side, the word processor supports tables well, the spreadsheet does charts, and the e-mail program neatly hands off e-mailed photos to the image viewer. But it's less of a full-blown writing tool than Blue Nomad's WordSmith (there's no spell checker, and the font display is spartan). Finally, while Documents' presentation module lets you do some rudimentary editing, wrangling a PowerPoint slide show on a palmtop screen is just as ungainly as it sounds.

At 2MB, Documents To Go is portly for a Palm software app, and its $70 street price is almost double that of $40 competitors Iambic Office and Cutting Edge Software's Quickoffice (the $50 Documents To Go Standard offers just the word processing and spreadsheet modules). Then again, Documents To Go Premium does more than the other guys do--and you can try out the full version for 30 days before you buy.

SUMMARY

DataViz Documents To Go 5 Premium Edition Pricey, well-rounded Palm office suite permits slick and effective file synchronization. Street: $70