Notices

If you install Easy Debian it comes with Open Office, would that help?

you need to enable extras-devel repo to get access to freoffice
(and yes it is on purpose that I don't include more information).

Research how to add repositories - read the warnings - etc...

I tried Gnumeric, Abiword and FreOffice. All good but some docs I get sent for work would just dont open or formatting screwed up.
Never tried the EasyDebian/OpenOffice option.

So I just paid the $30 for the DataViz My Documents to Go full edit version and so far its handled all Excel and Word docs.

The thread "MS Office viewer for the N900?" (4 posts) has been merged into this thread.

Open Office on Easy Debian is not that great. Don't get me wrong, it works, but the only time I tried to use it was to download and read the agenda before a meeting. I started opening the office suite and browsing for the file about 10 minutes before the meeting started. I couldn't get it working in time, so I put the phone away into my pocket.

Two hours later, when I pulled the phone out, my battery was completely dead (had been for at least a half hour).

So it works, but it's far from practical.

It takes like 1-2 minutes to initialize, but after that it's pretty smooth. Overclocking should help.

Are there plans with the Libreoffice fork to look into compiling and packaging open-source Office equivs for us N900 users?

Also, any idea when the ones in beta-test will make it into the production extras repo?

Just that I'd rather not fork out 20 quid if I'm using OO on all my other kit.

I concur with this, I'm running at 900MHz and once loaded Open Office is very much usable, just remember to use your stylus!!

I really like Abiword and FreOffice (depending on what I want to do), I rarely resort to using easy debian and openoffice

I'm sure this has been thought of before but it occured to me that if you are only interested in viewing a Word document you can use Abiword or Open Office to convert the document to a html format and then view it with a browser. I suggest using Opera. When I tried it I found the user experience was great because Opera enlarges text smoothly with very nice wrapping. For the documents I tested neither Abiword or Open Office were perfect (some equations and symbols were messed up) but for general text documents it is more than sufficient. Also, while converting documents with Abiword is much faster than Open Office, Open Office did a little better with some symbols.

EDIT: If you save a Word document as a html file when using Word, and then look at it with Opera on the n900 (you have to copy the html file and corresponding folder with figures, gif files and so forth on the n900) the text, including equations comes out very nice. Similar result for the case of writing a document using Open Office and saving as html. Not quite as good with Abiword. (For example, it omitted the horizontal bar in a fraction)