
- MOST USEFUL APPS FOR ANDROID TABLETS FULL
- MOST USEFUL APPS FOR ANDROID TABLETS ANDROID
- MOST USEFUL APPS FOR ANDROID TABLETS OFFLINE
ThinkFree Office Mobile has great Microsoft Office document support. And if your document includes complex formatting that you’d like to preserve, you can pretty much count on disappointment. pptx files almost always introduces some sort of error in my experience. It handily imports Office files for viewing and editing, and keeps simple files more or less intact, but saving those files as Office.
MOST USEFUL APPS FOR ANDROID TABLETS ANDROID
Once you’re connected, however, the Google apps look good and play as nicely as you’d expect with the Android browser.Īs I’ve documented elsewhere over the past few years, Google Docs has more than its share of compatibility issues with Microsoft Office document formats.

The app itself is designed for phones, not tablets, so its six main buttons leave tons of empty space on the tablet screen.

What you actually get with Google Docs is an Android-friendly set of links to the Google Docs Web apps.
MOST USEFUL APPS FOR ANDROID TABLETS OFFLINE
Offline editing, in my view, is a fundamental enough feature that its absence here seriously limits this app’s usefulness. While it’s understandable that you can’t open documents from your online Google Docs account without a connection, the fact that you can’t cache documents for later editing or create new documents for later uploading makes it hard to think of this app as a full-featured editor. Google Docs is great for accessing your Google Docs Web account, but it lacks offline editing.Google Docs has proven to be a serious, though somewhat flawed, alternative to Microsoft Office on the Web, so I was really interested to see how the Android app would perform, given that it’s running on Google’s own OS.ĭisappointingly but unsurprisingly, Google Docs for Android doesn’t do much of anything without a live data connection to Google Docs on the Web.
MOST USEFUL APPS FOR ANDROID TABLETS FULL
Because we’re interested only in apps with full editing capabilities, I did not evaluate free versions that merely view documents. I evaluated each app for its interface and ease of use, its compatibility with Microsoft Office, and its ability to sync with cloud services. I used the apps for daily writing as well as for viewing and editing spreadsheets, and I created a test presentation (something I don’t normally do in the course of my work) in each app. To see how well tablet productivity suites work for practical document editing, I spent two weeks working almost exclusively in popular productivity apps for Android slates and iPads. Mobile productivity suites bring the document-editing features of desktop suites like Microsoft Office onto the tablet, but are they ready for serious business? I tried four top options to find out. And now that a tsunami of tablets is flooding the market with models running a variety of operating systems, that fantasy is starting to look very plausible indeed.

If you fantasize about a life on the road unencumbered by laptops, their accompanying power bricks, and other heavy business gear, you’re not alone.
