.KEYWORD wordsmith
.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE WordSmith: powerful and portable word processing
.OTHER
.SUMMARY The highly regarded word processing application WordSmith gets frequent mention in the pages of PalmPower. At long last, Jennifer McKinnon provides a full review of this powerful software that lets you view and edit Word and Palm OS Doc files on your Palm handheld.
.AUTHOR Jennifer McKinnon
The more you can make your Palm handheld resemble a desktop PC, the more useful you’re bound to find it as a mobile enterprise tool. You may already be using your Palm handheld for functions such as scheduling, email, and Internet access. Well, wouldn’t you like to add full-featured word processing to that list? With the powerful application WordSmith, now you can.
The first thing that I noticed about WordSmith after downloading it from Blue Nomad (at http://www.bluenomad.com) was the size…all 467K of it! It’s a true Palm OS heavyweight, in the class of other full featured programs that make your Palm handheld more like a desktop PC. It’s big, but you get a lot for the kilobyte. WordSmith has three main modes of operation: word processor, memo pad replacement, and ebook Doc reader. Plus, it can edit your existing Palm OS Doc files. So, if you have an ebook that has a glaring typographical error, with WordSmith you can edit it, save it, and re-compress it!
Blue Nomad, LLC, sells WordSmith as "trialware." the program will allow you to have 200 editing sessions before it expires. After expiration, it can still be used as a memo pad and ebook reader. However, WordSmith is the type of program you’d probably either buy or delete. Every Palm handheld has a built-in Memo Pad program, and ebook readers are usually smaller than 75K, so the space taken by an expired version of WordSmith could be put to a lot better use. However, if you’re like most business users, you regularly need to create and edit documents on your Palm handheld and synchronize them with Microsoft Word. If that’s the case, you’ll be gladly laying down your $29.95 and wondering how you ever lived without an application like WordSmith.
.H1 First use
When WordSmith is run the first time, it asks if you want to remap the Memo Pad hard button to launch WordSmith. This is highly recommended, since WordSmith makes an excellent Memo Pad replacement, allowing you to add character and paragraph formatting to your memos, as shown in Figure A.
.FIG A WordSmith easily adds formatting to memos.
As you can see from Figure B, WordSmith adds RTF (Rich Text Format) coding to the plain text of the memo. This formatting is preserved during HotSync operations, but it could get ugly if you print from the Palm Desktop software.
.FIG B Here’s the memo from Figure A when viewed by the built-in Memo Pad program.
When I first started using WordSmith, I thought formatting memos was a nice but useless feature. However, after giving the feature a try, I’ve decided that the ability to format memos is a really good thing. I’ve found it a lot easier to find important items in lists when the text is bold or underlined.
As a Memo Pad replacement, WordSmith proves itself extremely useful, but this is just a warm-up for the main attraction.
.H1 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.
.FIG 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.
.FIG D You can save your documents in either Palm OS Doc or RTF format.
.H1 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.
If you happen to edit both the versions on your PC and your Palm handheld, the conduit will treat the Palm handheld version as the most recent and treat the PC version as a backup, adding the suffix "-back" to the filename. This is one of the simplest and most efficient ways of keeping track of multiple copies of documents that I’ve ever seen. I’ve used this feature almost daily while writing this review and never had a problem with losing formatting or getting versions confused. If you have a need for seamless Word integration, everyday you go without WordSmith, you’re wasting time.
.H1 WordSmith vs. Word formatting
Most all document formatting is preserved during synchronization, but certain kinds, like database links and inter-document hyperlinks, are lost. For most documents you’ll create, it’ll be impossible to tell that they’ve been synchronized to your Palm handheld and back.
.H1 Conclusion
WordSmith is a tool for serious writing on your Palm handheld. Pairing WordSmith with a Palm Portable Keyboard (at https://store.palm.com/Catalog/productdetails.asp?productnr=3C10439U) makes for an unbeatable writing combination that’s incredibly portable. No mobile enterprise user should be without this powerful one-two punch.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on WordSmith, visit http://www.bluenomad.com/ws/prod_wordsmith_details.html.
For more information on Palm Portable Keyboards, visit https://store.palm.com/Catalog/productdetails.asp?productnr=3C10439U.
For more information about Palm computers, visit http://www.palm.com.
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.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO Jenny McKinnon is an all around Palm fanatic who enjoys living on the beta-testing edge and living to tell about it. She can be reached at jennykitten@mail.com.
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