MS Office Mobile 6.1 released for Windows Mobile 6 (includes Open XML support)

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KevDaly

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#16186 28-Sep-2007 07:00

Get it from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4b106c1f-51e2-42f0-ba32-69bb7e9a3814&DisplayLang=en

This upgrades Office Mobile 6 to 6.1, which allows you to read and edit Office documents created in Open XML format (observant readers will note there's nothing about creating them, but that's not such a biggie).
They've also thrown in the ability to view and extract files from .zip folders - which makes sense since Open XML documents are stored that way.
You can also view SmartArt in PowerPoint Mobile if that's the sort of thing you like to do.

This is a welcome development: Microsoft couldn't really afford to leave this one until version 7, given that the dreaded, revered, firstborn-sacrificed-to iPhone apparently supports Open XML already.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a few more actual WM6 devices in our neck of the woods? Especially from say, oh I don't know, Telecom and Vodafone?

(via Jason Langridge)

tonyhughes

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#88448 28-Sep-2007 07:29

KevDaly: Wouldn't it be nice to have a few more actual WM6 devices in our neck of the woods? Especially from say, oh I don't know, Telecom and Vodafone?

I believe this prayer is to be answered before too long... :)

freitasm

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#88459 28-Sep-2007 08:12

Yep, it looks like October will be a busy month around here...

KevDaly

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#88460 28-Sep-2007 08:15

I've installed the update on an Emulator image.

During the process a dialog popped up, with the title "Error", and the two options "Yes" and "No"...not knowing "Yes or no to what?" I clicked "Yes" and it continued.
There now appears to be a single (somewhat ugly) Office Mobile icon - when you click this (without checking this out it appears that it's actually a folder view) you see the 3 Office applications listed with new Office 2007-style icons.
So far I've successfully opened a .docx format document I created a while ago on the desktop.
Whether saving this or a new Word document the options presented by File->Save As are *.docx, *.dotx, *.rtf and *.txt.

I've also just successfully opened a *.doc format document - when saving this the options are *.doc, *.dot, *.rtf and *.txt - so don't plan to use this to do conversions.
Oh, and the .zip folder browsing and extraction works as advertised (this feature is apparently called Zip Mobile. Gosh)

So in summary (and bearing in mind that this is based on a brief test running on an emulator where I had a mysterious error during installation), you seem to get the following:

- Zip browsing and extraction

- The original Office formats can be read and edited.

- The Open XML formats (for supported Office file types) can be read and edited.

- The Office file types for newly created documents appear to be Open XML only (this doesn't bother me, but people should be aware of it) in addition to the others such as RTF and TXT (in the case of Word, which is what I was trying out)

- There doesn't appear to be the ability to convert between Office formats (new vs. old).

Overall I like it, and I'm looking forward to be being able to use it for real some day.

PS. The emulator image I tried it on was Windows Mobile 6 Professional (what we used to call Pocket PC Phone Edition in those long ago, more innocent times)

chiefie

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#88469 28-Sep-2007 09:13

Do you know if OneNote Mobile 2007 will be grouped together under that Office Mobile group folder by detection, i.e without having to move it into there yourself?

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KevDaly

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#88470 28-Sep-2007 09:18

chiefie: Do you know if OneNote Mobile 2007 will be grouped together under that Office Mobile group folder by detection, i.e without having to move it into there yourself?

I don't know at the moment - that's an interesting question.

KevDaly

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#88611 29-Sep-2007 08:22

I've just learned that this update was released prematurely and inadvertently and has now been withdrawn.
http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonlan/archive/2007/09/28/office-mobile-update.aspx

Oh well.

Cynic

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#90058 8-Oct-2007 10:47

KevDaly: Wouldn't it be nice to have a few more actual WM6 devices in our neck of the woods? Especially from say, oh I don't know, Telecom and Vodafone?

Wouldn't it be just as nice to have WM6 upgrades for the devices we've already shelled out mega$ for ???