DataViz has put out their popular Documents To Go. This mobile software suite made its name on Windows Mobile (who?) They a have now set their eyes on the iPhone and look to make a solid companion to your desktop word processor.  To attest to how easy this is to use, I typed the whole review in this app.

Landscape and portrait mode

First and foremost when you buy an app like this with hopes it will have a landscape mode, I can confirm it does. It is a little slow in the transition, but after it transitions works great.

Toolbar

All of the features in Documents To Go are accessible by a slick toolbar that holds 5 icons in portrait mode and 7 in landscape. The next set of icons are just a swipe away. Much like the pages of the iPhone the toolbars many icons can be accessed by a swipe left or right. It is very responsive and slick. Great choice for a mobile device. To get to the individual options just click an icon and your choices will pop up. If you are confused as to what an icon stands for just hold that icon for a few seconds and the descriptive text will pop up

SAVE

docs to go gives you standard save features. Save and Save As. Save lets you name and save a previously unamed and unsaved file or just save a current draft. Save as lets you save and name a previously unnamed and unsaved file, or save a copy of the current draft.

Clipboard

The clipboard let’s you choose from:

• Cut
• Copy
• Paste
• Select All

The method to select appears to need improvement. To select you tap and hold, the magnifying glass will pulse, then slide your finger through the text you want to select. I would have liked them to have implemented Apples cut and paste or at least the selection method…and imagine they will once 3.0 is official. Once selected, you touch the copy and paste icon and select your option. Cut and Copy work as you would imagine. The text is copied to the clipboard waiting to be used via the paste function. Each function has a dedicated button.

Send

I thought it was great to see the send button front and center, until I pressed it. I got this message: “To send a file as an attatchment, you must set up an Exchange ActiveSync account in Documents To Go” Well that lost it’s charm fast. According to a Tweet I read they do plan on supporting MobileMe, but what about the people in between?

Character Formating

I guess you expect to see character formatting but cor some reason it was a nice surprise to see it in this first release. With options like :
Bold
Italics
Underline
Text Color
Background (see picture above)

I would like to see the option for choice of font and font size, but again, not a bad set of options for a first release.

Paragraph Formatting

These options are pretty straight forward. Left, right, center, alignment, justified, and distributed .  The features so far really make this a must have mobile document creator, but wouldn’t replace Word…obviously

Bullets and Numbering

You have two choices. Bullet points or numbers.

• a
• b
• c
• d

1. a
2. b
3. c
4. d

I really enjoy taking notes in a outline format. When using both bullets and indents you can develope a full outline. However it isn’t as fast or intuitive as I would have liked. So I hope to see this improved in the future. At this point custom bullet points are not supported but would be a welcomed addition.  What can I say, I like pretty bullets.

Indent

Documents To Go provides both increase and decrease indent. Like I said earlier. You can use these in combination with bullets for outlines. Other than that the use is as you would expect.

Search & Replace

Now let’s talk about icing on the cake. DataViz did a great job adding and implementing search and replace. When you click the search icon you are greeted with a clean little search window. Type in your word or phrase and hit search on the keyboard. Be careful not to hit Done, it sits where you would expect to see search, right beside the search input.

Tap the arrow below the search field and you are presented with Replace and the option to toggle Case Sensitivity and to search Whole Words. This again works and works well. If I could change anything, it would be the option for live search. Like in Firefox, I enjoy watching my results appear as I type.

Zoom

The older I get, the worse my eyes get. I find myself squinting and straining to read. Next thing you know I have the text inches from my face. Enter Zoom. Zoom allows you to increase and decrease the percieved text size from 50% to 200%. Great for those of us whole might be a little (lot) blind.

Go To

Have you ever been writing a doent and had to go back to the begining, middle or end quickly? The Go To is for you. That is exactly what it does. Ordainarily this would be a nice touch, but is actually a needed feature. From the begining I noticed that scrolling was an issue in this release of Documents To Go. It lacks that same fluid movement that you are use to in most apps. Where as Go To doesn’t fix it, it does provide a quick way to get to major parts of the document. The flaw I found in the document I was working on would indicate it was much longer in the scroll bar than it actually was. This made the Go To Middle button not work right. It would take me to a blank section of the page, way under the typed text.

Undo & Redo

Any word processing or document creation app worth anything has to have an way to Undo an action. Lucky for us we get both undo and redo. The undo and redo both work several steps forward and back, but I have yet to test how many steps that is.

Word Count & Info

Just to round out this incredibly rich mobile word processing app, DataViz adds Word Count. This will give you your word, character, and, paragraph count at a glance and…well that is all it really does. The feature set is simple but invaluable.

Lastly info provides a quick glance at the files info size, date modified, name, and file type.

Conclusion

DataViz has put out a solid first release of Documents To Go. Even though this is a great app it does have a few bugs and a major missing feature. Spell check! Surely I can’t be the only person in the world who spelling is atrotious. I doubt this is an oversight as much as a feature set in development. First I would imagine a spellcheck dictionary would be huge and the process to do so might make this first release unstable. I had a couple of crashes while writing this. Granted I didn’t restart the device after install. My initial impressions are that the app itself is a little slow. It isn’t completely unusable. Just has a little bit of a lag to it. I expect this to be addressed in the first update and don’t expect an issue at all on the iPhone 3Gs. I would like to give DataViz props for adding the ability to rescue a document after a crash. Nice touch. Currently only Excel viewing is available but DataViz does plan on adding Excel editing in the future via a free upgrade.
Documents To Go comes in two flavors.  With and without mail support.  You can grab the version without mail support for $4.99 (two weeks only) For only $5 more you might as well grab the the support for Exchange (MobileMe in the future) at $9.99. Documents To Go is a steal. Once they add Excel editing I would easily pay $20-$30. If you haven’t picked this app up then hurry. You only have 2 weeks to take advantage of the $9.99 price. After that it is going to go up. Based off of the feature set I imagine it will go up quite a bit.

Buy Documents To Go with Exchange (MobileMe soon)  support here $9.99 and without mail support here $4.99

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