After answering a phone call and sending text messages, though, it was torture figuring out how to return to the last document. I went back to Hotmail, and the document was no longer open. I went to the Office menu, yet the document did not appear. (I thought the iOS, despite its lack of multitasking, to be more intuitive than Windows Phone 7 for finding your previous place after an interruption.)

And wait, how did I get to the point of e-mailing files to myself again? I stopped doing that when Writely, the Google Docs predecessor, launched more than 5 years ago.

I didn't realize that with Windows Phone 7 you can also access Office files from a browser at office.live.com. That worked swimmingly with even a long Word doc. But your guess is as good as mine as to why I received an error trying to download a small XLS file that was perfectly fine when I downloaded it to my desktop from SkyDrive.

OneNote

Microsoft is emphasizing OneNote, its handy note-taking program for those who get to know it. It's great for lists of things like to-do items, meeting notes, and grocery lists, and you can even add phone voice recordings and photos. Windows Phone 7-style Tiles organize your searchable notes, which are easy to find when you open Office Mobile.

When I added my voice recording and a picture to a grocery list, though, it was tricky to prevent the touchscreen from popping up and getting in the way of a full view of the note.

Word

Office Mobile appears be better for viewing documents created on a desktop than for working with a blank slate. Creating a Word or Excel document from scratch is no easy task on a tiny phone with a touchscreen keyboard. At the same time, you can at least get started writing, then e-mail the document to yourself for better access later at a desktop PC.

Just as in Office for the desktop, contextual menus shift depending on what you're working on. For example, you're unable to work with a comment until you select a cell with a comment in it. This tends to drive me as crazy in Office Mobile as it does in Office 2010 for the desktop, but some users swear by it.

Excel

If you need to crunch numbers, Excel Mobile offers an impressive number of features, including 114 common functions. You can insert charts, apply filters, and do multilevel sorts. Once I got the hang of the contextual menus in Excel, it became more obvious how to finesse them.

Excel's interface offers three icons by default: Outline, Comment, and Find. The options expand to include options such as Sort, Apply Filter, Format Cell, Undo, Redo, Save, and Send.

Excel Mobile even lets you freeze frames, a handy way to jump through a long spreadsheet on a tiny screen. But I ran out of time trying to find that option.

Could I cut and paste it to the first line? No. Nor could I quickly find a way to delete all the blank lines above what I'd typed. From the phone, I e-mailed myself the failed, brief Excel spreadsheet. But when I opened it from the desktop, the document was blank.

PowerPoint

You can view, but not create, PowerPoint presentations with Windows Phone 7. Creating PowerPoint slides from scratch on a phone does seem like a rare need, and one that would be tricky to execute on a small screen. I can see how some users might want that option, however. Still, you can edit slideshows sent as e-mail attachments.

Open that in real time, and you can watch the slideshow live. You can even dial into the meeting and listen in while watching the presentation on the phone.

Next page: E-mail, and how useful is Office Mobile?