Microsoft Office and Adobe PDF Support On The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

Just a quick blog post to share what works in terms of Microsoft Office support on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, as well as whether we can read PDF documents “comfortably” on it.  You may find this useful if you’ve been searching around the interwebs for something that actually works on the 5800 since it is so new and many software producers still haven’t incorporated touch support into their applications yet.

QuickOffice

QuickOffice, as you may know, is *the* software suite for viewing, as well as editing, Microsoft Office documents on your Symbian phone.  It supports the latest edition of Microsoft Office, which create documents in .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx formats for Word, Excel and Powerpoint respectively.  Below is the procedure to get QuickOffice Premier working on the 5800.  Some pre-requisites first:

Follow the instructions in this post to get your certificate and key files for your phone’s IMEI.  I can’t help you do this (actually, I can, but it will cost you since I have to do the heavy lifting for you, haha).  Then do the following:

1. Get a copy of an installer that will “trick” the installer in part 2 to think there is a base package already installed on your phone.  Otherwise the package in step 2 will complain about all sorts of errors like “cannot install, install base package first”, or “update error”, etc.  Sign this installer using your own certificate and key file, and install it onto your phone.
2. Get a copy of QuickOffice Premier Upgrade version 5.0.32 from “somewhere”.  Extract its contents, and sign it.  Install it onto your phone.  It will install in the phone’s memory, you can’t choose where to install it.
3. Get a copy of QuickOffice Premier Upgrade version 6.0.236 from “somewhere”.  Extract its contents, and sign it.  Install it onto your phone.  It will overwrite version 5.0.32 you installed in step 2.  At the end of the installation, the installer will ask you to reboot your phone.  Do so.
4. Enjoy!

What doesn’t work properly:

1. You can create a Word document, but can’t enter text.  No amount of whacking on the screen will bring up the virtual keyboard.  Forget about editing/creating Word documents.
2. When you first launch QuickOffice Premier, you can’t choose which documents to open – you have to use a File Manager such as Y-Browser to do this!
3. While editing/creating a Powerpoint document, you can only edit the “main” text box.  You can’t “select” the other text boxes for editing.  This sucks.  Wait for QuickOffice to support touch devices.

Adobe Reader LE

Adobe Reader LE version 2.5.15.11 works on the 5800 with minor caveats.  Of course you need to search for the installer yourself, and it should consist of two files – the installer proper, and a <ahem> <cough> file to make it permanently yours.

All features seem to work fine – reflow mode works, zooming works, rotation works, full screen works.  To scroll the document, you need to be in “continuous” page viewing mode.  What doesn’t work is when you are in full screen mode, and need to exit – you can’t, except for pressing the “End Call” (red) button on your phone to close Adobe Reader LE.  Just open it again to read another PDF file.

So there you go.  I don’t know if the “what doesn’t work” thingies I mentioned above had to do with the fact that I installed Adobe LE Reader first before QuickOffice; frankly I’m too lazy to test again since this would require a factory reset of my phone and this is a painful process as you can imagine.

Some screenshots for your enjoyment below.

Having problems locating the files?  Drop a comment and I may be motivated to help out

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