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Review: Documents to Go Professional Edition v3Reviewed By: Bill Stiteler Review Date: April 16, 2001
I love my Handspring Visor, especially since I discovered it can run other applications besides Dope Wars. Addresses, appointments, news, Dope Wars...it's truly a versatile computer and a useful peripheral to my Mac. In fact, in a lot of ways, it reminds me of the first Mac I ever used, a Classic, I believe. Don't trust any computer you can't pick up. Still words to live by. But while I can heft the 9600 and iMac I use for the bulk of my work, they're a bit unwieldy to take on the road. And while my Visor does a good job with simple notes and calculations, sometimes that just isn't enough. There are a slew of freeware/shareware document and spreadsheet programs, but the drawback to them is in integration with the desktop. Enter Dataviz, maker of the well-nigh indispensable MacLinkPlus. I like to make fun of Mac users to think they can run Apple better than Jobs, but I have to admit, the day they stopped bundling that program with the OS without replacing it with something of their own was a sad, sad day indeed.
Here's how things work; you create a Word or Excel document on your computer. You then drag and drop it onto the Documents to Go program, and when you synch, it's placed on your handheld. Pretty much what you'd expect. There are two versions of each program you can install, a "full" version which allows you to edit a document, and a "lite" version which allows viewing only. The full version also supports a few more features (bold, italic text, etc.) at the cost of a bit more memory.
Sheets to Go was a bit more bothersome. I downloaded a spreadsheet I use at work everyday for creating invoices and estimates. When I tried to access it on my Visor, I was informed that it was locked--I could view it, but not edit it in any way. The reason? I was using formulae not supported by Sheets to Go. I found this a little hard to believe; the only thing the sheet did was simple multiplication and sum functions. Figuring out what was wrong involved a long process of going over my original document and altering things one by one until it became usable. It would have helped if Sheets to Go could at least point what the formulae were or where they were located in the original spreadsheet.
The skimpy manual doesn't help, either. It's more a starter on the basics of using the program, and the PDF file on the disk is just a PDF of the skimpy manual. The Apple Help has a few more answers, but in the case of my formula troubles, it mostly told me what I already knew (that the file was locked due to unsupported functions) and then confused me by showing an extensive list of which functions were supported--which included the ones I was using. Nor would it tell me definitively how to enter a new formula on the handheld, or whether that was impossible. Was I pushing the program too hard? I don't know. After checking website support and doing a search online for answers, no one seemed to be asking the questions I was, so perhaps everyone else knows something I don't. I'd recommend Word to Go for anyone who wants an easy-to-use program from a company with a good reputation. I found Sheets to Go, on the other hand, to require a lot of tweaking, even when dealing with the most basic computations. Like the amount of profit made from buying 'shrooms in the Bronx and selling them in Central Park.
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Now Dataviz wants to get onto your Palm-based handheld as well with Documents to Go, which is really two programs: Word to Go for Microsoft Word, and Sheets to Go for Excel (other common document and spreadsheet formats are also supported; consult 
Word to Go worked relatively error free. I downloaded a short story I'd been working on and was able to read and edit it with no problems. There are, however, a ton of programs available to read the .doc format, and some of them free. But Word to Go does feature a remarkably simple interface, meaning you don't have to hunt around for that crucial file, either on your handheld or your Mac.
Another problem is that while I could create a new spreadsheet on my Visor, I was unable to get Sheets to Go to recognize a new formula. It simply showed the function as text. I then loaded the sheet onto my Mac and opened it in Excel. Excel, too, showed it as text, but when I selected the cell and hit "enter," it correctly converted it, and the result of the formula was now displayed. When I synched back with my Visor, it showed the result now, as well. So, it ultimately works, but in a roundabout sort of way.