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MWC 2009: Android Gets Microsoft Word And Excel Viewer

One of the limitations of the Android platform is its inability to work with some of the basic business applications used by many, including Microsoft Word and Excel. Quickoffice decided to do something about that.

Quickoffice has long made software to let users of mobile phones interact with their vital Microsoft documents. This week, it announced a new version of Quickoffice for the Android platform, which is available for download from the Android Market.

The $8 application lets users download Word and Excel files from their Gmail account directly to the phone's memory, or open the documents from within Gmail. It can also open documents stored on a memory card.

Quickoffice for Android lets users zoom in or out so that files can be more easily read and scroll through the entire document. It will automatically rotate if the phone is turned sideways, and text will also automatically wrap so there's no fussing with scrolling left or right to read an entire line of content.

The Word viewer specifically shows all the formatting, tables, and numbered/bulleted lists. It also has a great feature that creates hyperlinks for phone numbers, Web addresses and email addresses. Touch the hyperlink, and the user can automatically initiate a phone call, open a Web site, or start an email. Quickoffice says the first page of any document will load very fast so users can identify the content of the document easily.

Some of the things users can do in Excel include the ability to resize columns and rows, and display cell content with the cell and number formatting intact.

You can also rename and manage your files.

You cannot, however, edit your files. That's kind of a downer.

If you're an Android user and need a productivity application, Quickoffice is a decent start. Hopefully the ability to edit Word and Excel files is on the way.

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