What is the best alternative keyboard? The best calendar app? Discuss and vote for your favorites here.
Jun 29th, 2017, 1:45 am
(I'm not going to try to create a poll for this. If someone else does, fine by me...)

I looked around for a decent office suite for my tablet. There are a number of them out there. I mainly need to be able to view MS Office docs and spreadsheets, and do minor editing. I don't try to create them on the tablet. And the tablet is usually off line, so being able to store docs and spreadsheets locally was a requirement.

Back when I used a Palm PDA, a package called Documents to Go from Dataviz got the nod, but their offering for Android left a lot to be desired.

What I wound up settling on was WPS Office+PDF, a freeware offering from Chinese Kingsoft Corp. The previously offered a package called Kingsoft Office, which is also available for Windows. I don't care about being able to work with Power Point files (and avoid Power Point like the plague elsewhere.) For PDF viewing, I normally use the open source MuPDF app. WPS Office can store files to and load them from my Google Drive, and has handled everything I've tried it on. I was amused to note that WPS Office Word appears to handle MS Word's Track Changes feature. Failing to handle that was a blocker on other systems for offerings like Open Office and Libre Office, and I know folks who kept MS Word around solely because they needed that capability.

WPS Office is ad supported freeware, but thus far the ads have been unobtrusive and easily ignored. There is a subscription offering for a pro version that doesn't have ads, but it hasn't been needed here.

I also have an Android port of the open source Open Office package installed. It works, but requires configuration to be useful. Here, that involved turning off the toolbars, because the embedded icons were just too big, and playing with scaling to get a display that correctly fit my 7" tablet in landscape mode, with the tablet configured to default to displaying AOO in landscape. I use it with an external hardware keyboard.

MS has freeware versions of Word, Excel and the like for Android. I looked, but they really need a fast device with a lot of RAM. They will run on my tablet, but WPS Office is a much smaller and quicker alternative.
Jun 29th, 2017, 1:45 am
Nov 12th, 2017, 12:04 am
Offices Suite+pdf.
Nov 12th, 2017, 12:04 am