Documents To Go review

Creating and editing Microsoft Office-compatible documents should be considered a standard feature for any business phone. Although you probably won’t want to write a novel on any mobile, being able to receive and edit a document is vital.

Documents To Go offers a partial solution to this problem on the iPhone. It comes in two editions. The first, Documents To Go, allows you to view, create and edit Word files, and also includes support for viewing Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and iWork documents.

The second, snappily entitled Documents To Go with Exchange Attachments adds – you’ve guessed it – support for opening and sending attachments from a Microsoft Exchange-based email account. You can’t open attachments from any other kind of mail account with either edition. You can, however, send any document via email.

Both editions support two-way synching with Macs and Windows PCs, allowing you to get documents on and off your iPhone via WiFi with relative ease. Importantly, they also support Word 2007 documents, which are becoming much more common.

At the moment, Word is all there is – there’s no support for either PowerPoint or Excel documents creation. However, the company has stated that it is working on Excel support, and this will be a free upgrade for all customers.

Create a new document, and you’re given a blank page and the familiar iPhone keyboard, in either portrait or landscape modes. Above the keyboard is a small row of icons for saving or emailing you’re document, formatting fonts (including bold, italics, underline and highlighting) and justifying paragraphs. You can also zoom in to the document, which hides everything and gives you the maximum possible reading space.

Three little dots

If that were all there was, Documents To Go would be decent, but nothing to write home about. However, three little dots on the menu bar hint at more options, and if you swipe across the bar to scroll it sideways, they are revealed. In fact, in addition to these formatting options there’s a lot more besides. There are indents, bullet points (both bullet points and numbered); a comprehensive find and replace; word, paragraph and character counts; and navigational options which let you jump to the top or bottom of a page.

Overall, the features are on a par with a desktop word processor of a few years ago, which means there’s an awful lot of work you can do with something like this. What’s missing is support for graphics – you can’t insert a photo, say – or tables, which will limit the usefulness of the product in some business contexts.

However, it’s worth noting that if you edit a document which contains a feature that isn’t supported, you won’t lose the unsupported bits when you save the document. Documents To Go includes some smart technology that Dataviz calls “InTact”, which ensures you don’t lose tables (for example) if you edit on your phone.

iPhone keyboard issues

The main issues with Documents To Go stem not from the software but from the nature of the iPhone. Screen-based virtual keyboards are not an ideal way to tap out a few hundred words, no matter how adept you are at typing with your thumbs. And there’s no option for a small portable external keyboard, as you have with many other smartphones.

But one feature that’s missing which I really felt the absence of was a spelling checker. Although word correction works as you’re typing, it’s a bit of a hit and miss affair and your error rate can be quite high. A spell checker would therefore be useful, and the lack of one means you need to take extra care with proofing afterwards.

In short – and this is not the fault of the software – you couldn’t use an iPhone with Documents To Go as a laptop replacement for long. But within the confines of what the iPhone is capable of, Documents To Go is a very good choice for editing Word documents.