WordSmith Parts I-IV

amount of memory needed to open a Doc file - a 61K read-only Doc file still needed 150K free to open - but it does prevent you from accidentally editing files you only want to read. Since WordSmith opens in Edit mode by default, this is a good idea for files you don't want to edit.

My other complaint is the speed of the application - it's slow. Very slow. It took approximately 45 seconds to open a 10K Doc file. The 369K Doc file mentioned above was four minutes into the loading process when it crashed. I am running on a 16MHz Palm, but I was overclocking to 23MHz. I normally use cspotrun underclocked to 13MHz. At 13MHz, it takes cspotrun approximately 15 seconds to load that 369K Doc file (and it works even if I only have 4K free on my device).

In short, I don't think WordSmith is in danger of replacing cspotrun as my Doc reader of choice. cspotrun lets me select a viewing font of my choice, adjust the line spacing, and rotate the screen without making any changes to the Doc file itself. I like the fact that I can change the direction of autoscroll or use a dragging motion to move the text forward or back, but there is very little else to recommend about the Doc reader functionality in WordSmith.

Part IV: Editing and Word Integration

The last major type of WordSmith functionality is as a word processor with Microsoft Word integration. Here WordSmith is at its finest; it is by far the best Word Processing program I've seen for the Palm and it offers an acceptable level of Microsoft Word integration (although it is not without some problems in this area).

When you install WordSmith you can also install an add-in to Microsoft Word on both Macintosh and Windows. This add-in adds a WordSmith menu to Word that allows you to both Add the current document to the list of documents to sync to the Palm and to open any document that already resides on the Palm (whether it was created on the Palm or the desktop). This is a simple interface that makes it very easy to manage WordSmith from within Microsoft Word. You can also add any RTF documents to WordSmith but the process isn't quite as nice. Still, it's nice that WordSmith supports StarOffice and other desktop word processing applications besides Word.

On the Palm, any

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