gali

It’s all very well the n900 shipping with a link to download a trial of viewers for Excel, Word and Powerpoint files. It’s nice to see Nokia making the effort. The problems are that, while they do a very good job of rendering the files, they only do it for free for a month, and you can’t actually change the files.

What they don’t tell you is that since the days of the n900 and perhaps before, it’s been possible to work with some Office documents, including quite sophisticated editing of said documents.

Word Files

Easy as pie – all that’s needed is AbiWord, which is quite happy to read, edit and save Word 2003 documents. I don’t remember whether its in the Extras or Extras-devel repositories, but it’s already waiting to be installed on the device if you have them both there.

Excel files

This one’s a bit more complicated as gnumeric isn’t yet in a repository for the n900. However, Maemo is quite willing to let some older stuff install, if you do it from a Terminal window with root.

I’ve adapted the instructions for this from here and here, though with the slight change in that I’ve mirrored the .deb files locally for convenience.

And there you have it, a gnumeric icon should make its way into your menu, ready to run.

Or there’s OpenOffice

It is possible to get the full OpenOffice suite running on a n900, thanks to the easy-debian package (also available in Extras or Extras-devel already as ‘easy-chroot’ if I recall correctly), but this does come with the requirement for downloading a debian image over 1Gb in size to your device (fortunately, it can be stored in the larger chunk of space on a n900), and then the performance isn’t quite as great. However, I imagine it does offer significantly more power when it comes to working with documents, and it’ll work with many more file formats, including Powerpoint…