Posts Tagged ‘microsoft office’

Microsoft Office and Adobe PDF Support On The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

Monday, January 12th, 2009

nokia-xpressmusic-5800Just 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 :P

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Integration Between Google Services Just Got a Little Better

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

Specifically, I’m talking about integration between Google Docs and GMail.  You can now add the Google Docs “gadget” to your GMail screen, and it will appear on the left hand side towards the bottom after you add it.  Once added, the gadget will show whatever documents you have stored within your Google Docs account, whether they are word processing documents, spreadsheets or presentation documents.

To quickly and seamlessly share a document with anyone, all you have to do is to click and drag the document in question into the body of an email that you are composing in GMail, and the recipient will be able to just click on the document in question upon receiving the email, and then either access the document as a “collaborator” (ie. with editing permissions) or simply as a “viewer”.

Of course, you have to set up the recipient either as a viewer or a collaborator first in your Google Docs account.  Otherwise, it will still work, but the recipient will have to request access either as a viewer or a collaborator when he/she clicks on the Google Docs document attachment and prior access is not granted.

In case you’re still not aware what Google Docs is, it is essentially an online office productivity suite offered by Google as an alternative to Microsoft Office.  For most people, the functionality provided by Google Docs will be more than sufficient for their daily needs – have you not noticed how MS Office has gotten so bloated with features with each new release – features which most users neither need nor want nor know how to make use of?  Well, Google Docs is an online alternative, just like OpenOffice is a desktop alternative to MS Office.

To enable the Google Docs gadget within GMail, go to “Settings” – “Labs”, then scroll down and enable the “Google Docs gadget”.  Save your changes, and it should be reflected in your GMail screen immediately!

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