WinCE3 comes with Pocket Word and Excel. Pocket Word does little more than a typical text editor, some basic formatting, etc. It could open just about any spreadsheet I threw at it, without any lost formatting. I still don't see much use in a handheld spreadsheet. All that scrolling could give you repetitive use injuries.
Battery life seems adequate for typical usage.
Full recharge takes about 2 hours. The operating system is another story. Microsoft actually did a good job of simplifying and speeding things up. I don't remember seeing the dreaded hourglass very often. Something I can't say about WinCE 2.0.