OfficeSuite Pro is a powerful office app for Android phones and tablets. It allows you to create or edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents and also view PDF files on your mobile device. You can also link OfficeSuite Pro to your Google Docs account to view or edit documents — or create new documents on your device and save them to the cloud.
The app is available for $14.99 from the Android Market — but you can pick it up for free today from the Amazon Appstore.
I took the app for a spin on my HP TouchPad tablet running CyanogenMod 7.1, and it works beautifully. It takes a few seconds to connect to Google Docs every time you want to browse your documents, but navigating docs stored on your device is much faster.
There are a number of options for adjusting fonts, text alignment, and other settings within the text editor. The spreadsheet app includes shortcuts for basic functions such as calculating sums or formatting cells as percentages or dollars. You can also highlight cells with a variety of colors, insert functions, or create or view charts.
The presentation maker offers a number of templates for creating PowerPoint documents. I’m not really a PowerPoint guy, so I didn’t probe this section to deeply, but I get the feeling that it’s not quite as powerful as the text and spreadsheet functions — but it should at least let you view existing presentations on the go.
One nice feature in OfficeSuite Pro is the ability to pinch-to-zoom in any document for easy viewing. This comes in handy on a smartphone with a tiny display — but it’s also useful for manipulating spreadsheets on tablets with nice big displays.
OfficeSuite Pro is hardly the only mobile office app for Android phones and tablets. QuickOffice, Documents To Go, and ThinkFree offer similar apps… but OfficSuite Pro is one of the best of the bunch, and today it’s available for free — as long as you can access the Amazon Appstore. It’s not available yet in all countries, but there are methods for accessing it in unsupported areas.
It’s also worth noting that if you “buy” OfficeSuite Pro today from Amazon it’ll hang out in your list of apps forever. You don’t actually have to download it to your device today. So if you think you might want this app sometime down the road, there’s no reason not to add it to your cart today.
I did the dance there but got nowhere. That’s too bad!Â
I’ll bet that it comes right away when I pay for it, though. lolÂ
However, after this experience, I’ll probably never look to Amazon for any other apps. I buy a lot of books there with no problem, so it’s not like they don’t know me.Â