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Nook Color does Office docs

The Nook Color tablet/ereader supports an impressive list of Microsoft Office documents.

Office Watch reader, Dale M writes:

for the NookColor …. it reads natively, office documents in Office 2003 and in Office 2007 format. Works for Word, Excel and PowerPoint and maybe others.

Also, PDFs display quite nicely on NookColor. No loss of anything. Completely re-sizable and in my choice of portrait or landscape.

We’ve not been able to get our hands on a Nook Color but Dale is right, it does support Office documents both the old and new formats.

Mind you, finding this out isn’t made easy but buried down in the FAQ is the list of supported Office formats

Word: DOC, DOCM, DOCX

Excel: XLS, XLSM, XLX

PowerPoint: PPT, PPS, PPTM, PPSX, PPSM, PPTX (animations are not supported)

Non-MS Office files: TXT, RTF

The above files must be from Office 2003-2007.

In the full user guide there’s a list of all supported document types on page 55 (23 August 2011 version) which has a longer list of supported extensions.

However the important RTF format is omitted from the user guide list. 
UPDATE: Dale tested his Nook Color and it will NOT read RTF documents. Thanks!



  • PDF
  • EPUB
  • Word (doc, docx, docm, dot, dotx, dotm)
  • Excel (xls, xlsx, xlsm, xlt, xltx, xltm)
  • PowerPoint (ppt, pptx, pptm, pps, ppsx, ppsm, pot, potx, potm)
  • Plain Text (txt)
  • HTML (htm, html, xhtml)

While the macro enabled document types are included (eg docm, xlsm and pptm) we suspect there is no macro support, only the ability to view the document without macros running. That’s understandable but worth keeping in mind especially for worksheets that rely on macros to display results.

That impressive list of document formats plus email support and other goodies makes the Nook Color worth a look. Clearly Amazon has to improve the Kindle to keep up and rumor has it we’ll see a new Kindle tablet based on the Android OS (just like Nook Color) in the near future.

As voracious readers, Apple’s iPad is too large and heavy to be an effective ebook reader. It’s too heavy to hold in one hand for any length of time. Smaller devices like Kindle and Nook with longer battery lives are great for regular readers and it’ll be interesting to watch specialist ereaders bridge the gap to full blown tablets.

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