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I am considering buying a Flyer, and was wondering if somebody could try something for me please?
I've heard that you can edit office documents on the flyer, and was wondering if
A. It was limited to Microsoft Office,
B. Can you use drop down menus etc. setup in a spreadsheet,
C. Does formatting carry over directly from a P.C. or do you lose some of the formatting like most portable office viewers.
If somebody was able to carry out a few tests for me using Microsoft Office, and OpenOffice, I would be hugely grateful.
Cheers.
Steve.
Anybody able to give me any answers?
Well I'll add some info...I have not done a lot of document editing on the tablet, however. I have opened up some word, excel, and powerpoint documents, and it holds up the format well for viewing on tablet from what I have seen. The software used is polaris office. Editing abilities for powerpoints are severely limited. You can move stuff around and edit text. I am not seeing an obvious way to add items. Excel is similar in limitations. Word limits things to simple text editing (bold italics underline). Overall I'm going to say it is mostly just suitable for viewing these things, unless the document is very basic.
My other advice is to head on over to a best buy or sprint and try some of your files out first hand. They may let you plug in a sd card, or if not, throw a few files up on dropbox and download them to the tab in store. I did that to see how powerpoints would look on it, which was my main concern.
Cheers johnchad14.
I'll give it a try.
Does anyone else encounter similar problems with Quick Office's new update which allow us to type documents?
After the update, I have been using the word document function to a good extent but the app seems to be really buggy! The application will crash out of nowhere quite frequently and sometimes when I try to save my file, it'll say that it is saving and hangs there, and it didn't save.
As much as this is a highly anticipated update, its ridiculously halfbaked and just plain annoying to use. Would like to know if I'm just an isolated case or is this a common problem,
thanks =).
I've found it to be buggy as well, and I've only written one document with it. When I saved it it removed all the formatting including line breaks. All of a sudden my nicely laid out page with headings turned into one oversized paragraph in plain text
Fortunately I had copied the whole thing to the clipboard because I wanted to test something. So I deleted all the text, pasted, hit save and it crashed.
I then closed that document and opened a new one. Pasted the text, hit save, and it removed all the formatting again!
I tried a few more times, but every time it either crashed or removed the formatting *sigh*
I uninstalled and reinstalled Quick Office after that, but haven't tested it again. If it glitches again I'm just going to consider it useless.
Hows the ubuntu word processor? Is it any better? Have anyone tried it? Think i'm going to run Chroot ubuntu just to try it out..
I've been looking for the best app to take notes during class. It feels crazy that there's no Auto-Save in quick office.
One bug I've found to make it crash, when using the HP Bluetooth slim keyboard (if relevant) is, if I highlight a word, and type over it, it crashes. I lost like half my notes doing this. Now I just hit save every minute or two... and wish there was a keyboard (control s?) shortcut to do that.
I've also been trying Typewriter Beta... I really just want a Notepad esque text editor.. don't care about formatting really.
Fwiw, tapnote is the current winner. Least buggy of the ones I've tried.
. . NS4G . . CM7 . .
I found it to be generally useless as well. I just decided to use google docs (through the browser) for all of my notes. May try the office 2010 web suite as well.
Edit: Gdocs is working fantastically BTW, the only reason that I am considering using office is curiosity. Additionally, I have an app on my phone called camscanner so that if there are any handwritten notes, I can scan them with my phone (works surprisingly well), and share to Gdocs, and tie them to the typed notes I have taken.
I had the same issue. I tried to use it last week to take notes at a conference and it would lock up quite frequently saving to local storage. It happened often enough that I switched over to the built-in notepad app. I think I'm going to stick with that or perhaps even the email client for now with the hope/anticipation that when Android is on this puppy, I'll have significantly more options.
Today at lunch I used the Polaris Office app on the TFP to work on drafting my year goals for work.
I decided that I was going to save my work to a SD card so in Polaris Office I created a new file from the location where my SD was mounted at. After drafting two paragraphs of outline work, I switched over to the stock browser that I had running as I was trying to get on to the web. When I switched back to Polaris Office my entire document was blank.
Thinking maybe I cleared it by mistake I tried the undo command (CTRL+Z), I don't think the app recognize undo, clicked recent docs to see if I might have created a new doc by mistake nothing except existing docs I created in MS Office.
So I chocked it off as a fluke, thinking it probably could be from not ever hitting Save while I was working on it, so I rewrote the outline over again, and this time made sure to save the document to the SD card and giving it a specific name as it prompts for when you click Save for a new document.
When my lunch was over I took my tablet back to my workstation ejected the SD card from the Prime and inserted into my workstation PC. The PC detected the SD and gave me the option to browse the SD card. I browsed to the folder where I save the document working in Polaris only to find that the file was not there. The file never saved. WTF.
Now I can overlook the lack of spell check, broken bullets, but this app should be able to do a simple word processing function of creating and saving documents to removable storage.
now I certainly cannot recommend the Prime or it's bundled Polaris Office for educational productivity as with these performance results you will be screwed to try to do any writing reports on this device.
Have anyone here have similar experiences? discuss.
Use OnLive Desktop it's the best app for writing word documents
office suite pro is also pretty nice, much more options than polaris and autosave feature. It was on sale recently maybe its still.
Also there is a german software company called softmaker that is building full featured office apps, its currently in open beta status. You can download it for free.
The apps need some polish, but i think in a few months we'll have really nice offline office apps. With wifi around you can always use splashtop or onlive of course.
Google Docs
I had the same exact experience within the first few weeks with my Prime, and even worse, it was with a collaborative essay, so my pals were mad at me too! I was bummed, because Polaris was nice, but clouds5 is right, if you can afford it, OfficeSuite was by far the best I tried, and I darn tried every one out there. It's worth trying the trial right now. But my default now is the Germany Softmaker that he also mentioned. It has a great load of features that I was missing (Capitals at start of sentences, fix DOuble CAps, etc.) BUT, many of these features are hidden in the settings menu, so you have to scope them out. But get this, it also has user-defined AUTO SAVE!!! So even when I don't have Wi-fi and cannot use GoogleDocs, the auto save always has my back. I highly suggest you give it a try.
Totally agree with the op. Trying to use polaris and office suite through out my day proves to be buggy and frustrating. I gave up with them and haven't messed w trying to find one that will actually work.
Same happened to me also, hit save and it turns out polaris never saved it.
Lost a good chunk of my meeting notes.
Uninstalled it right away, been using gdocs or onlive desktop depending on my mood at the time
Sent from my Transformer Prime TF201 using Tapatalk 2
Just tried saving a word document on a usb stick from polaris, it worked fine, also plugged the usb stick in a pc and the file was there.... so not sure why it didn't work for you, although you might have selected sdcard which is actually the internal memory, i selected usbdsk1 in polaris when saving file.
edit; just tried an sd card, it also worked fine, made sure i chose "SD" to save too not sdcard.
diablosv36 said:
Just tried saving a word document on a usb stick from polaris, it worked fine, also plugged the usb stick in a pc and the file was there.... so not sure why it didn't work for you, although you might have selected sdcard which is actually the internal memory, i selected usbdsk1 in polaris when saving file.
edit; just tried an sd card, it also worked fine, made sure i chose "SD" to save too not sdcard.
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Yeah, I just did some tests and had no problem either, although I did have to use the Save As option and browse to the correct folder to make it save the document to my flash drive (/Removable/USBdisk1), and I noticed it defaults to back to /mnt/sdcard (which is actually the Prime's internal storage, oddly enough). So maybe some of those "missing" files are actually sitting there in /mnt/sdcard?
You guys should Google search Polaris bug. I love it when people judge the entire platform based on a flawed FREE app.
goodintentions said:
You guys should Google search Polaris bug. I love it when people judge the entire platform based on a flawed FREE app.
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True. I don't blame Dell because Word 2010 sucks so much. Now, I blame Dell for many, many other things, but that's not one of them.
To get back on topic, I've actually taken to using Evernote for all of my draft writing. The latest version has an excellent autosave function--a note is saved (first to a draft until intentionally saved) every time you switch focus away from the app. It's outstanding, and so far bulletproof. Then when I'm back in Windows, I copy the text into Word and format as needed (which I would do anyways; no Android office app can handle any complexity at all).
In fact, I think that's how ALL Android apps should work, at least those that create and edit documents of any kind. Lose focus, perform a save, because it's entirely possible--maybe even likely--that the app will close in the background. I'll have to check out out Office Suite Pro handles it--for when I actually need to work on a Word document, it would be my choice if it handles saves any better.
I hate to bump this thread simply because of the thread title, but I don't want to start a new thread to throw in my displeasure with Polaris Office.
Gary or Asus, et al. if you are reading this thread, pay attention.
This program is disastrous.
You should consider dropping Polaris Office from all Asus stock ROM's immediately.
I have read about the big in the past, but it has never happened to me personally so I always assumed it was an ID 10 T error.
Yesterday, just after I finished my 7 page annual self appraisal I saved my work. I opened ES file explorer to ensure it was there and saved properly before I closed out of Polaris office.
Yes, it was right there saved on the sdcard/documents folder.
I switched over Gmail to email it to myself so I could reprint it at work and gmail would not find the file.
I switched back over to Polaris Office and the UI was at file browser as if I had just started the program.
I browse back to sdcard/documents. The file is not there.
I switch over to ES File Explorer. The file is not there. Fortunately I had a saved copy on my flash drive that was about 2/3 done, so it was not an unmitigated disaster.
This is not Asus's fault by a long shot, but if Asus does not listen to feedback and continues to keep this program alive with now updates from infraware, then Asus's reputation will decline because of this.
I wonder why the Polaris update function on the prime doesn't work. On the S II its even if it returns there isn't any updates.
all office apps on android suck. i recently tried creating an excel using polaris, office suite and google drive, they are so tedious to work with. Good for reading but definitely not for drafting docs. windows and office are still the de facto
Sent from my Transformer Prime TF201 using Tapatalk 2
onlive question
tylermaciaszek said:
Use OnLive Desktop it's the best app for writing word documents
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Apparently on liveis not available in my country. Do you know if i need a windows computer to synch with this app? Also is it a monthly fee service or a one time purchase? I currently use ubuntu for my laptop os. Thanks in advance
tried kingsoft office on the prime last night and love it more than polaris. It performs pretty well.
crystalstylez said:
tried kingsoft office on the prime last night and love it more than polaris. It performs pretty well.
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I actually dislike Kingsoft Office, because of the fact that it lags so much on my prime compared to Polaris Office.
Also you can not write notes in the "notes section" of power point slides, where Polaris office can.
I'm always save using "Save as" now that "Save" isn't reliable in Polaris Office.
Although...
I use polaris office for a power point editor, and it seems that sometimes the file gets corrupt after I save it. So next time I open the power point file, polaris office freezes and then closes. Try to re-open the file, then a few seconds later, repeat, closes it self.
I don't really think tablets are the the right device for writing documents (except maybe the Transformer + keyboard), but when I do have to take notes I prefer Evernote. It syncs reliably, and I can access it from the web later to cut-paste into a Word doc if that's what I need to do.
tinnymarlin said:
I don't really think tablets are the the right device for writing documents (except maybe the Transformer + keyboard)
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i agree, i did use my prime at the beginning of the year for Uni essays and such, but i found the software is nowhere near up to scratch at this stage. it is missing too many simple things to be usable, especially when doing collaborative work (and a lot of my course is group based work). its too much of a pain fighting with file formats, lost formatting data, lack of auto-save features and much more. my prime now is just used to take notes, LibreOffice on my desktop does the real work.
Hello everyone. I am new to the forum. I tried posting this under the Asus transformer section, but due to me having less that enough posts it said I must post in general.
So I tried looking on the forum for exactly what I wanted and could not find it. I want an app that will let me edit any office or PDF file and let me to do it with a stylus writing freehand. I don't want to merely edit and just write in text, or highlight I want to be able to use my stylus and actually circle a word in power point, or be able to write notes freehand with the stylus on the side of the PPT. I do notice that Adobe let's me kind of do it with it's reader, but it just feels really laggy for me. If there is an APP available for me to try I don't mind if I even have to purchase it due to it being used for school.
Please give me your input! and thank you for letting me be apart of your community!
Polaris Office which is included free with your Transformer Prime let's you create and edit Word, Excel and Power Point files. I don't know about scribble-annotating them since I don't believe that the Microsoft Office Suite knows how to display that kind of notation. Also for any meaningful editing you will need the onscreen keyboard or keyboard dock.
As for editing PDF files, I don't know of any apps off the top of my head that will do what you ask. You might try searching the Play Store.
almightywhacko said:
Polaris Office which is included free with your Transformer Prime let's you create and edit Word, Excel and Power Point files. I don't know about scribble-annotating them since I don't believe that the Microsoft Office Suite knows how to display that kind of notation. Also for any meaningful editing you will need the onscreen keyboard or keyboard dock.
As for editing PDF files, I don't know of any apps off the top of my head that will do what you ask. You might try searching the Play Store.
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Yeah I tried Polaris office...and I really want to do free hand scribble editing. PDF editing I am actually ok with Adobe as it lets me do what I want, but I really need something else for my office programs, because I am going to use this for school in lecture. I do have the keyboard as well, but I want to be as light as possible with just the tablet and stylus in hand.
I use ezPDF Reader Pro for PDF annotations for notes from my professors at school. I think it was $2.99 in the play store. It works great.
I havent found a good office app. Polaris Office, though it came on the prime free, is buggy and is limited on formatting. It works great for basic docs. You can only save in .doc format and docs i have created sometimes look way different when opened on a computer. But it does work.
I am still looking for the best app for an Office suite on android. Although SoftMaker Office mobile is coming along great. It is in beta still.
Find it at the following:
www.softmaker.net/down/TestMaker.apk for word
www.softmaker.net/down/PlanMaker.apk for excel
www.softmaker.net/down/Presentations.apk for powerpoint
Have you tried using the dedicated writing programs for use with the stylus already (just to see if you can even tolerate writing with the Prime)? Even with the apps to improve the TFP's response to stylus input they're still not something that's even remotely efficient to take notes with. If you just want to draw arrows or circle things or make quick (but relatively large) drawings, it's okay.
I generally annotated my pdfs using Repligo reader. I could do light annotations with the stylus and enter comments in stickies. You could easily convert powerpoints into pdfs and comment on them that way.
As far as I know there isn't any Office app that supports inking yet, which isn't that odd since most suites can't even do basic tasks like display charts properly in Excel and Powerpoint.
IMHO, Android is still pretty abysmal when it comes to doing this sort of thing.
The official adobe reader app lets you scribble annotate straight out of the box. I use it regularly
Office Pro 6
I don't know if it will solve your issues, but Office Pro 6 is on sale at the Amazon App store for $.99. It's normally $15.
http://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Systems-Inc-OfficeSuite-Professional/dp/B0051UP5NQ/ref=mas_6pack_productivity_Suite_link?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-5&pf_rd_r=054VF38RVZ32RE41XXGQ&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1371696742&pf_rd_i=2350149011
I think it's better than Polaris, especially on spreadsheets.
BTW first off let me thank all of you for your responses! I did know about adobe having its native edit and I had stated above I was fine with that . Although on the other hand, the power point is the BIGGEST one I have an issue with. Although punitenshu I like your idea the most which is just to convert it over to PDF...I just didn't want to do that every time I received a new lecture.....Thank you everyone you have been such a big help!
Repligo Reader hands down. If you really fussy about accuracy, use it in conjunction with touchscreen tuner.
So i got myself an OBD bluetooth scanner and the Torque app...bloody brilliant.
So much information!
anyway, i cant seem to get it to upload data logs to the web viewer?
i have my account created and setup correctly but nothing in the web viewer when i log in.
Does anyone use the app and have any ideas on how to get this to work?
Secondary i have e-mailed myself some data logs and cant get them to open properly?
I cant seem to get Track Recorder to work with Torque Sync software, it stucks at Searching for Torque
Valiceemo said:
So i got myself an OBD bluetooth scanner and the Torque app...bloody brilliant.
So much information!
anyway, i cant seem to get it to upload data logs to the web viewer?
i have my account created and setup correctly but nothing in the web viewer when i log in.
Does anyone use the app and have any ideas on how to get this to work?
Secondary i have e-mailed myself some data logs and cant get them to open properly?
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I imagine the particular posters have found answers to their problems seeing as this thread
dates from 2014 but I thought it might be worthwhile answering all the same as I ran in to the same niggles when I began using this app so if anyone searching these issues subsequently may find some worth from my reply.
First of all as a far as experience and knowledge is concerned. Firstly with cars;fixing,modifying, engine management tuning, obd2, diagnostics. Basically my auto knowledge is extremely wide and extensive from approx 35 years of obsession and getting stuck in an the deep end whereas my knowledge and experience of computers and smart phone tech is on much, much shakier ground
In fact, for those of my vintage. i.e late 30s,early 40s remember when we were kids. and programmable VCRs were the height of cutting edga technology. Well I'm like the way our parents and grand parents were then. i.e pretty much baffled by it and even following the instructions it was hit and miss whether you actually managed to record that film rhat was on at 4am lol.
So for the second issue brought up by the OP it doesn't matter whether you email yourself the log file or not (I found the few times i tried it that the file wouldn't attach and when it did the problem was the same anyway) you need Microsoft Office or any other type of office suite to view the files. On the pc i have Microsoft office but had to download an app to my phone to view. csv files. Again an office suite that not only displays. csv files but puts them into a spreadsheet format is required.
As for the first issue it's preferable in every way to view the site. on a pc because on the phone display the actual box to sign into is off screen and takes a little bit of zooming out and seaching to find, the same goes after you have signed in when another box appears with a list of the logs files recorded and the tab to choose it. This is where my lack of fundamental computer/web knowledge comes in. I can't tell you why it doesn't sit nicely inti an easily accessible mobile format but it doesn't. Once you've found the first sign in box/pop up it becomes simple, annoying but simple.
As for there being nothing after signing into the webview site successfully all I can assume is either you've no log files to view which you should have if it's all been set up correctly, including choosing which PIDs to send to logfile or the pop up/window where you click on your logfiles is right off screen and has to be looked for. Of course you don't get that problem if accessed using your desktop.