The right office apps for the Android at work

The best Android spreadsheet editor
Separating the good from the bad in terms of the suites' spreadsheet functionalities doesn't take long; two of the contenders dominate the competition, with one winning by a nose.

Documents to Go: The spreadsheet editor in Documents to Go is feature-packed and a cinch to master. The basic interface resembles Excel's, so it isn't difficult to figure out how to manipulate cells and perform the tasks you need. Inserting a function brings up a full-screen list of options, which can be viewed unfiltered or sorted by category (financial, statistical, and so on). Controls for cell and sheet formatting are easy to find and use. To switch between multiple worksheets, you select an option from the app's View menu, which brings up a dialog box with a list of existing sheets.

The Documents to Go spreadsheet editor offers several advanced capabilities, such as freezing panes, sorting cells, and jumping to any specific cell within an open sheet.

OfficeSuite Pro: OfficeSuite Pro's spreadsheet editor is fairly comparable to the one found in Documents to Go. The app is intuitive and full-featured, including all the basic and advanced options described for Documents to Go.

In fact, when looking at the spreadsheet editors alone, it's honestly difficult to distinguish Documents to Go from OfficeSuite Pro. Both are very good, though OfficeSuite Pro's main menu -- which you have to navigate to reach the spreadsheet editor -- is still a weak point.

Quickoffice: Quickoffice provides several of the same features as Documents to Go and OfficeSuite, but many of the options are placed in multilayered menus that make them difficult to find. Number formatting, for example, is on the main list of options that appears when you press your smartphone's Menu key -- but to get to font formatting, you have to press Menu, then tap More, then find the desired formatting in a scrollable list that pops up on your screen.

The app is lacking options for overall cell formatting, and functions have to be manually typed in; there are no Excel-like lists of functions that you can insert on demand.

The Quickoffice spreadsheet editor does offer a jump-to-cell feature, and you can conveniently manage worksheets via an option in the app's main menu.

ThinkFree: As with its word processor, ThinkFree places common commands for its spreadsheet editor along a scrollable bar at the bottom of screen. The flaws of this approach are even more apparent here than in our last category; it's painfully tricky to figure out what some of the icons represent, making basic use somewhat of a challenge.

ThinkFree's spreadsheet editor also does not provide any user-friendly way to insert functions; you have to manually type them out in a box at the top of the screen. The app does, however, offer a jump-to-cell option and a simple process for worksheet switching.

Google Docs: Google Docs' spreadsheet editor is much like its word processor: If you need to view something or do very basic editing, it's a light and simple way to accomplish the task. Features and options, though, are practically nonexistent.

The verdict: Documents to Go and OfficeSuite Pro are fairly well-matched and surpass the rest of the pack in terms of spreadsheet capabilities. But thanks to Documents to Go's superior overall interface, it edges out OfficeSuite for the top spot in this category.