07 August 2011

Keep taking the tablets (1a)

Since putting up Friday's post, I've had several queries about writing on the Asus TF101 (Transformer) – variations on the theme of “did you write this post on the tablet and, if so, using what software?”

Answer: it was shuffled back and forth across three machines, two of them Windows (laptop and netbook) and one of them the Asus/Android tablet/keyboard combination. Roughly half of it, altogether, was written on the Asus; final fiddling and subediting before upload was on the laptop.

On the Windows machines, writing was in WordPerfect though final prep was in OpenOffice Writer.

On the TF101, the office suite provided free with the machine was used: Polaris Office. I have tried several alternatives, and bought the two main market leading standards which I've used happily on other platforms, but Polaris, to be honest, knocks the socks off both.

I'm afraid that there is, if you are doing this sort of cross platform shuffling, no alternative to using Microsoft's file formats. Polaris reads/writes DOC and DOCX; so do the other main alternatives; nothing reads anything else. Even RTF is badly served. If you have a favourite word processor (like my WordPerfect), and prefer to stick with its own native file format, then ... tough. You can write in what you like, but use "save as" to store it in Microsoft's form.

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