One of the great things about smartphones is that they are so easy to carry around. They’re especially convenient for email. Too bad it’s so hard to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files on them – or is it? Check out some cool apps that do just that.

Mobile Apps for Office Productivity

Early in December, Matthew Miller of ZDnet did a good comprehensive piece comparing some major office apps, including DataViz’s Documents To Go, Kingsoft Office, OfficeSuite Pro, Polaris Office comes from Infraware, Quickoffice Pro, and ThinkFree Office.

All of them view office documents including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on various types of smartphones, but to varying degrees of effectiveness. The usual price for such apps is now around $10 each but some of them come preloaded on several models of smartphones at no cost. Those include ThinkFree Office, Quickoffice, and Polarus Office.

The most expensive office app, at $30 (but often discounted) and according to Matthew Miller, the best app for working with office documents on the small screen is DataViz’s Documents To Go. It renders documents well on the screen, nearly as well as on a laptop, and allows users to do a surprising amount of formatting, particularly within Word docs. Its formatting includes bold, italics, underline, font color, alignment, bulleted and numbered lists, tables, bookmarks, comments, footnotes, endnotes, track-changes, word count, find and replace, and more. It basically allows users to view, edit, and create Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents to the extent that you’re up to it with a tiny keyboard.

Impressive as Documents To Go is, I was also interested to see what the $0.99 app, Kingsoft Office, does. You can view and edit Word and Excel files but just view PowerPoint files. With Kingsoft Office you can:

• View all documents
• Browse folders
• Access cloud storage
• Create a new document (Word and Excel only)
• Duplicate an existing document
• Email a document
• Send a document to the cloud
• Delete a document
• View help files (launches web browser to help site)

Not bad. You can also view documents with the free version of the app.

OfficeSuite Pro 5 is a $10 app that looks like it does most of what DataViz’s Documents To Go does. It allows you to create Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents and do a good deal of formatting in them. It also offers a fully functional 30 day trial version.

Polaris Office is a very basic app that views office documents and permits a bit of editing. It’s one of those apps that often comes preloaded on many models of smartphones.

Matthew Miller says that the $10 Quickoffice Pro is his favorite app for his iPad. It’s a full-featured office app that views and creates Word, Excel, and PowerPoint office documents. The differentiating factor for this app is its text-to-speech function in which the thing reads your document to you. It is also well-integrated and can store documents in the cloud to several services including Google Docs, Dropbox, Box.net, Evernote, Huddle, and several others.

He also reviewed the $10 ThinkFree Office but found it the least cool office app of the bunch.

Here are Matthew Miller's basic findings:

• Documents To Go: Near desktop quality with all format options and track changes. No security and limited cloud support.
• Kingsoft Office: Very inexpensive and fairly full featured. Limited cloud support and lame Excel function capability.
• OfficeSuite Pro: Comes in very strong with an attractive user interface, password protection and security in documents, and support for Excel chart creation.
• Polaris Office: Decent viewer with print support, but not visually appealing with clunky user interface.
• Quickoffice Pro: Excellent functionality with the best cloud service support and many things in the advanced table.
• ThinkFree Office: Broken with latest update, but looks to support basic editing needs.

Are you using an office app on your phone or tablet computer? What do you think? What are your favorite apps and what features do you use most for your organization?