



This week I tested the free version of Office Note by Resolvica, the next app in my experiment to find a decent word processing app that is good and cheaper than Pages.
Unlike last week’s app, Office Note has a lot more features. You can tab, undo, redo, and look at the revision history. There are three options of which set of hot keys you want at the top of the keyboard. The size, color and style of the font can be changed, and words can be in bold and italics and underlined. You can highlight a large chunk of text to delete it or make style changes. The app wants to autocomplete words and knows when you have misspelled words, but you can’t add words to the dictionary. The app has a dictionary; it accesses online dictionaries and searches when you select “Research.” When you need help, there is an extensive guide with videos and the opportunity to email someone and ask for help.
Office Note lets you insert photos, audio, and handwritten content. The photo is of me asking Billy Dee Williams a question at this year’s Crypticon in Minneapolis. Photos can be cropped and resized in the app.
Here is an example of handwritten content:
It can be difficult to position pictures, but once you do, you tap the hand icon in the upper left. Doing so will let you lock and unlock images. This feature makes Office Note versatile. The app automatically saves your work, which was handy because I explored the app and decided to check out templates. The template feature was unavailable, and the app started a new page for me. The first icon in the upper left is the Notes section, and I found this document listed there, allowing me to find and continue this article. There are different export options. I was able to export to Google Drive. One image was out of place and some of the font had changed, but I was able to easily fix that in Drive. I made changes here and in Google Drive, and the text synced when I synced to the BeWrite folder, but for some reason I had difficulty with the images. It’s nice that the texted synced, but the trouble with the images made completing this article take more time than I expected. In fact, I had a lot of trouble keeping the images when I exported. I had to copy this article to Word, and then insert the images into the Word document to make sure my document was intact. Of course, when it came time to publish this article, I had to save the images as files so they could be in this final form.
I don’t know why this feature is in the list of export options, but if you scroll down, you will find the word count feature.
There are ads, but you can buy the full version for $9.99. For my needs right now, the free version is fine as long as I stick to creating text-only work. For the 2013 holiday season, you can buy the full version for $4.99. Office Note is for iPad, is rated 9+, and requires iOS 5.0 or later.