The Daily App: OliveOfficePremium for Android

OliveOfficePremium (yes, it’s all one word) is a free download from the Android Market, and provides a straightforward way to access and view files in the .doc or .docx, .xls or .xlsx and .ppt or .pptx format. With built-in support for Google Docs and Dropbox, OliveOfficePremium also supports creation and storing of files locally on a device’s internal memory or SD card. (However, repeated efforts to access documents in our Google Docs account just didn’t work. It’s unclear why.)

Where it gets a little dicey is in the process of actually creating and working on a document on an Android Tablet. We downloaded, installed and tried OliveOfficePremium on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, and found it to be sort of quirky. For example, it installed with the default mode being in Caps Lock – but navigating to the preferences to turn this aggravating feature off was not exactly intuitive. Additionally, creating and writing in a .doc file was frustrating because we could only work in portrait mode, not landscape, and with a phone-focused QWERTY touch-screen keyboard.

This app is highly rated in the Android Market (several thousand reviewers give it an average score of four out of five stars). While serious work should be done on a more robust app, OliveOfficePremium is fine in a pinch for viewing files on the go.