As a Memo Pad replacement, WordSmith proves itself extremely useful, but this is just a warm-up for the main attraction.

Document editing
WordSmith has just about every editing feature that you could ask for. The basics--such as bold, italics, and underline--are easily accessed by buttons at the bottom of the editing screen. WordSmith also supports subscript, superscript, and strikethrough formatting. Much to my surprise, it can also create and preserve Word footnotes and endnotes. Even with all these features, WordSmith is still extremely easy to use.

Features like contextual menus, pictured in Figure C, and dialog boxes that are well organized and easy to navigate make WordSmith as simple to use as the built-in Palm OS programs.

FIGURE C

WordSmith makes formatting easy by using contextual menus.

WordSmith allows you to save your documents as normal Palm Doc (ebook) format, which makes sharing your files with any other Palm handheld user a snap. Now you can beam the latest edit of your sales contract to a colleague for proofreading. The default is to save your file in RTF format, for synchronizing with Word. WordSmith can also compress the file to save space on your Palm handheld. The included conduit makes this a simple task by automatically compressing newly created documents during a HotSync operation. Keep in mind that WordSmith has to decompress a document to allow you to edit it.

The save options are pictured in Figure D.

FIGURE D

You can save your documents in either Palm OS Doc or RTF format.

WordSmith and Word
What makes this program the 800-pound gorilla of Palm OS word processing programs is its seamless integration with Microsoft Word. This integration is what makes all of WordSmith's editing features worthwhile. The included HotSync conduit makes it easy to choose which word documents you'd like to load to your Palm handheld. Also, the conduit, by default, saves all documents created on the Palm handheld to the "My Documents" folder on your PC. But this is easy to change if you prefer to have your documents stored someplace else on your PC.

WordSmith has finally made version control simple. First, by keeping all documents in RTF format, WordSmith eliminates any document format conversion errors. RTF is a text-based format, so there's no need for any complicated format conversions, since Word is able to read RTF as a native format. This also makes it simple for non-Windows users to use documents created with WordSmith.

WordSmith treats all documents on the Palm handheld as the most recent versions. No changes are made to any documents on the PC when they're first loaded onto the Palm handheld. If you edit and save the document on your Palm handheld, then during the next HotSync operation, the WordSmith conduit will add "-orig" to the end of the original document's name on your PC. This becomes a backup of the document before it was ever synchronized to the Palm handheld. The conduit then creates a document with the original filename that's a copy of the document on the Palm handheld. Now you can HotSync as normal and always have the most recent version on your Palm handheld for on-the-go editing.