Product Reviews

The release of Dataviz's Documents-To-Go 7 Total Office Edition is big news, because it's three software programs in one. It includes Documents-To-Go, Beyond Contacts and SmartList-To-Go.

Documents-To-Go is a multifaceted program, but its most useful function is its core feature: it takes Microsoft Word and Excel documents and converts them for use on your Palm. It does this far better than Microsoft's own Windows Mobile (Pocket PC) utilities, preserving more formatting and presenting the documents more successfully. You can adjust the font size and screen orientation, enabling you to fit loads of data on high-resolution screens such as the Tungsten T3's.

The Total Office Edition of Documents-To-Go includes extra features. Charts created in Excel are transferred to your Palm. In practice this function has limitations, as your Palm actually receives instructions for creating the chart and then does its best to re-create it from the data. The chart won't look as good as Excel's equivalent but it's an achievement to have any charting at all on such a compact device.

There is a more serious limitation, though. If your Excel spreadsheet contains a formula that Documents-To-Go doesn't understand, it 'protects' the spreadsheet, which means you can't edit or create charts from it. This is a bigger problem than it may seem. Apart from the test chart we created just for this review, all the spreadsheets we tried were 'protected'.

Earlier versions of Documents-To-Go were painfully slow at searching for data in spreadsheets. This is still far from instant in version 7 but at least it is a usable feature now.

Converted PowerPoint presentations look very impressive. They appear on the Palm with all their illustrations and almost all their layouts intact, except for a few inevitable font substitutions. Presentations

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runs slideshows straight from the Palm and, if you have a device such as Margi's Presenter-To-Go, you can connect it directly to a projector.

You can transfer PDF files to your Palm, although whether you'd want to is debateable. Adobe's own PDF Reader for Palm is free but you have to download and install it yourself. DataViz's Documents-To-Go PDF reader costs money but is installed with the rest of Documents-To-Go.

There are differences in the way they work, too. Adobe PDF Reader tries to maintain the graphics and layout of the original. It fails miserably. If the original has multiple columns, it's likely to produce a meaningless splash of gibberish on your Palm. Documents-To-Go's PDF Reader reliably strips the PDF down to text which, in most circumstances, is far more useful.

Inbox-To-Go is also bundled with Documents-To-Go. This is an unpretentious and reliable email program. Rather than trying to send email through a wireless link, it passes messages you write to your desktop email program next time you HotSync.

In other respects, it's very advanced. Attachments remain embedded within the message so you're not left scouring your Palm to find them. And as Documents-To-Go supports native formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, you can email documents from Inbox-To-Go, confident that anyone with an Office-compatible application will be able to read them.

Beyond Contacts tries to replicate Outlook on your Palm. It transfers data from the Calendar, Contacts, Tasks and Notes modules, and makes a fair attempt to recreate the appearance of a Windows desktop too. The problem with Beyond Contacts is that it tries to improve on a feature that already exists on most Palms. Even the baby Zire 21 has software that synchronises with Outlook. Beyond Contacts really just presents a different way of viewing your Outlook data rather than a better way. In some respects it actually has fewer functions. The Contacts module is a case in point. Whereas the standard Palm Contacts module uses a Tungsten or Zire's five-way navigator button to scroll through your address book, Beyond Contacts doesn't, making it far more cumbersome to use.

Documents-To-Go remains the jewel in the crown of this Total Office Edition. There isn't enough distance between Beyond Contacts and the standard Palm applications to justify the expense. In the Documents-To-Go family, the £58 Premium Edition is the best value.