Receiving email attachments when you’re out and about can be infuriating if you don’t have the apps to open those attachments. That’s unlikely to be a problem for Nokia Asha 501 owners thanks to My Pocket Office, with the ability to open and read Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.
The apps are currently at a beta stage, but already they’re more than capable if you want to open files and see what’s been sent to you.
My Pocket Office comes in three distinct flavours, covering Microsoft’s most popular applications:
My Pocket Office – docx
The first screen you’ll see when you open the app comprises: Open files, Recent files and Bookmarks. As the apps are designed for viewing documents rather than creating them, there isn’t an option to start a new document.
As the name hints, files need to be saved in a docx format before you can open them, but I found they opened straight away when converted.
It’s easy to zoom in and out of your documents, thanks to big + and – buttons at the top of the app, and if it’s something you want to read again you can drag up the menu bar from the bottom of the screen and tap ‘Add to bookmarks’. That way, the next time you open the app, simply tap ‘Bookmarks’ and select that file.
The documents I transferred to my Asha 501 were easy to read, but the app couldn’t recognise certain punctuation marks. It’s not a deal-breaker if you just want to read your files, but it could make a big difference if you want to check that everything is perfect in an important document.
All three of these apps have a similar appearance, making them easy to use after you’ve tried the first. The colour scheme is different for each app, with blue for Word, green for Excel and red for PowerPoint – as with the icons on the full Microsoft apps themselves.
When opening my spreadsheets with My Pocket Office – xlsx, they looked perfect in miniature. It’s easy to swipe around the display to see more detail, and once again you can zoom in if the text isn’t big enough.
Unlike the other two apps, My Pocket Office – pptx automatically starts up in landscape mode. It needs to, as PowerPoint files easily take up every millimetre of the Asha 501’s display.
The first presentation I tried to send over to my Asha 501 was some 11 slides long, so took a couple of minutes to load up. Trying it again with smaller presentations resulted in much quicker responses.
Press the play button and it’s possible to switch through all the individual slides, and this is where the big + and – zoom buttons really came in handy.
The slight formatting bugs found in the Word app reared their heads again, with hyphens replaced by small squares, but if you just want to check information in your slideshow then My Pocket Office – pptx is ideal.
Overall the My Pocket Office apps have a lot of potential. Because they’re still at a beta stage minor bugs are inevitable, but they’re surprisingly polished and easy to use. Only some minor formatting issues let them down at this point.