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Word To Go Synchronize, edit and create word processing files. Perfect for when you need to modify that important contract on the go.

Sheet To Go Need to work on "what-if" scenarios with your forecasts? Use Sheet To Go to open, create and synchronize spreadsheets files.

Slideshow To Go Synchronize, edit and rehearse your PowerPoint files and make that last minute change to your presentation on the plane or the taxi. (Windows onl

Inbox To Go Synchronize e-mail, view and even edit attachments (Windows only)

PDF To Go Open PDF files and manuals

Pics To Go Open and view graphics and pictures

SmartChart Technology View or create excel charts

REMEMBER the quaint notion that technology would make us more productive, get us home sooner and bring us closer to the Leisure Age? Forget it. By shackling us to our work around the clock, almost every personal-tech advance these days has just the opposite effect. The Internet keeps you at the office even overseas; the laptop keeps you chained to your spreadsheets on the plane; the cell phone hunts you down at the restaurant or in the bathroom.

Clearly, there's a conspiracy afoot between electronics makers and our bosses. Where's Oliver Stone when you need him?

In a continued effort to whittle away our remaining private minutes, the makers of hand-held computers have been waging a public-relations battle for the hearts of a critical clientele: corporate technology managers, who buy products by the hundreds to issue to their employees. Microsoft's message—a successful one so far, if its climbing sales in corporations are any indication —runs along these lines: ‘‘Don't buy Palm organizers. Sure they're smaller, less expensive and last much longer on a battery charge than our own Pocket PC palmtops. But among other features, Pocket PC's let you take your Word and Excel documents on the road for editing any time, anywhere.''

Palm is striking back with a vengeance. Beginning this week, every new Palm T5 or T3 comes with a copy of Documents to Go 10.0, the latest version of a remarkable program that transfers Word and Excel files to a Palm, where you can create, read, edit and even format them.When you return to your desk and press the Palm's synchronization button, the changes you made on the road appear as though by magic in the original, desktop-bound versions of those documents and spreadsheets. (If you own an older Palm or Palm clone, you can also buy Documents to Go separately for $49.99; if you bought T5 or T3 in the last 90 days, you can download the program from the DataViz site for even less.)

To transfer your Word and Excel files to the palmtop, you just drag them onto an icon on your computer desktop. The next time you synchronize the Palm, you'll find those documents neatly copied to it; you open, read and edit them on the Palm using stripped-down versions of Excel and Word.

Because a palmtop lacks the speed or memory to handle every shred of document formatting, your Word files show up, on the Palm, with only basic formatting intact: bold, italic, text colors, paragraph justification and two font sizes. You see tables, but no graphics or variations in typefaces. The advantage of reading Word files in this simplified view is speed in scrolling and editing.

Excel spreadsheets on the Palm bear a closer resemblance to their desktop-bound originals, especially on color Palms. But charts and graphs don't survive the transfer. Note, too, that you wind up doing an awful lot of scrolling; only eight full spreadsheet rows, and three full columns, fit the standard Palm screen.

Even so, you can perform most of the editing you'd do on the big screen. By tapping, writing and dragging on the screen with your stylus, you can add or delete text (which is especially practical if you've outfitted your Palm with a portable keyboard), format text and numbers, create Excel formulas, and so on.

The mini-Word and mini-Excel programs take up a good chunk of Palm memory (800K, or 150K for even further stripped-down versions that let you read but not edit your documents). But otherwise, DataViz has done a much better job than Microsoft in accommodating the relatively low power of a palmtop. Word and Excel files, no matter how large or complex, open instantaneously on the Palm; on the Pocket PC, you're treated to a several-second appearance of the ‘‘wait'' cursor whenever you open or close a file.

Here's something else you won't catch Microsoft publicizing: after being edited on a Pocket PC, many documents bear only a passing resemblance to the originals. All kinds of information gets stripped away in the process, including your typeface choices, footnotes, headers and footers (including page numbers), links, automatically numbered lists, tables and—worst of all for writers—style sheets. If you've spent much time creating anything more elaborate than simple memos on your PC, discovering that your efforts have been wiped away by your palmtop can be a certifiable Rolaids moment.

This is the big deal in Documents to Go: When transferring edited files back to the desktop computer, the program doesn't simply replace the originals, as the Pocket PC does. Instead, an amazing technology called DocSync swiftly and invisibly compares the edited versions with the originals and then makes the changes selectively. That is, the program tucks your added, deleted or reformatted text and numbers into the original documents, without disturbing whatever fonts, graphics, footnotes, styles and other formatting elements were there.

DocSync is a brilliant piece of engineering. It's worth noting, however, that it works only with Microsoft Office files. If you're a heretic who uses WordPerfect, Word Pro, Quattro Pro, Lotus 1-2-3 or AppleWorks, there's good news and bad news. Documents to Go can transfer your files to your Palm for editing, too, but DocSync doesn't kick in. In other words, you may lose some formatting when you transfer the edited files back to your computer, just as on a Pocket PC.

Version 8's big-ticket new feature is its ability to display PowerPoint presentations on your Palm. Each slide neatly fills the Palm's screen (in color where available). Of course, when it comes to displaying slides, the Palm is no projection TV; the text of bullet points, for example, is generally too small to read. Fortunately, tapping an on-screen button magnifies the slide, whereupon dragging the stylus around the screen scrolls the image. Exactly as in the full-blown desktop version of Power- Point, icons in the corner of the screen let you switch into outline view or speaker-note view.

You can't edit or project these PowerPoint files, which may make you wonder what the point is. That's easy: rehearsing. With your slides on your Palm, you can run through your talk on the plane, in the taxi or backstage, just before showtime. And in my book, any technology that fosters better PowerPoint presentations is a positive step for humanity.

If you buy Documents to Go, you get two valuable extras: a module that lets you read Acrobat PDF files on the Palm (minus graphics), and an e-mail program that receives and lets you open Word, Excel and PowerPoint e-mail attachments. (If you get Documents to Go free with a new Palm, on the other hand, you must pay $20 for these two add-ons.)





Despite all of this happiness, the rough edges in Documents to Go are enough to give you the occasional software splinter. A few bugs lurk: if you try to make a whole spreadsheet row or column bold, for example, the program actually deletes whatever is in the first cell—and there's no Undo in this case. A few opportunities were missed: you can't doubletap a word to select it, as you can in a real word processor. And Macintosh users are shortchanged: the Mac version lacks both the PowerPoint viewer and DocSync. (In other words, Mac users lose some formatting when documents are brought back from the palmtop.)

Still, version 10 is the most useful and well-built Documents to Go to date. Thanks to its DocSync feature, the days of finding footers, footnotes and formatting stripped out of your desktop documents are over. In fact, Microsoft's Pocket PC's are no longer the only, nor the best, palmtops for editing Office documents on the road. This time around, the game Palm is playing isn't catch-up; it's leapfrog.

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