At long last you can now get Office 2007 support for earlier Windows Mobile 6 and some Windows Mobile 5 devices! So you can now view Office 2007 documents on your handheld.
It was released by Microsoft last week (28 November) without much fanfare. I first became aware of it from a post from Jason Langridge's on his MSDN blog
Some of the very recent Windows Mobile 6 devices already appear to have it. For example my HTC TynTyn II (which is a great device, by the way) already appears to have office 6.1, so doesn’t need it.
Device Version Support
This is how the device support breaks down:
1) Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC or Windows Mobile 6 devices - as long as it came with Office Mobile you can use the FREE upgrade to install Office 6.1 and get support for Office 2007 documents .
2) Windows Mobile 6 Standard device (i.e. Smartphone) which didn’t come with Office Mobile (e.g. The HTC S620) - for the first time I am aware of you can buy Office Mobile 6.1 from the Handango Retail store and install that assuming your device has free space.
3) Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone (e.g the ubiquitous SPV C500 etc ) - you are out of luck however! Sadly there is no upgrade path or way of getting Office Mobile 6.1 If Office 2007 support is that important to you, you are looking at a device or Windows Mobile OS upgrade if one is available.
In addition to Office 2007 support there are some other new features around charting in Excel and support for Zip folders. You can get full details here as well- http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4b106c1f-51e2-42f0-ba32-69bb7e9a3814&DisplayLang=en
Installation Tips
I selected the Worldwide English US (default) download for my installations. On my SPV E650 I found that the installation complained about my device having a different language installed compared to the update. I therefore I set the language (not the locale) on the device (Start / Settings / Regional Settings) to be US English rather than UK English. This requires the phone to be powered off and on again. The update then installed fine and I set it back to English afterwards (with another power on/off)! I couldn't see a specific UK English install amongst all the other downloads so this may be the way forward.
Availability on Windows Update
I don’t know whether this is going out on Windows Update for Mobile 6 devices or not. It is a 12.6 Mb update and I'm not sure if it is considered a core OS update.
SmartPhone (Windows Mobile 6 Standard) Issues & Workarounds
I have just installed it on my SPV E650 and it seems fine in Word and supports .docx files. I haven’t put any large documents through it however. I did notice that the Smartphone version (sorry Windows Mobile 6 Standard) still doesn't let you create documents natively on the device however. Not sure why this is given some of the devices such as the e650 now have fullish keyboard support.
The workaround to this frustration is fairly well known. You simply copy a blank document or template document to your device using Active Sync or Windows Mobile Device Center. Then open the blank document each time and use the Save As menu option to save it to the filename of your choice... Easy. Why there is a Save AS but not New, I'm not sure.
Future Tasks
I am going to try this Office 6.1 update on a Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC device (Orange M5000) shortly so I'll update this post when I know what happens there...