WordSmith Parts I-IV

Since the font face is not displayed on the Palm, I see no reason why people shouldn't be able to tag text with fonts that haven't been used yet.

Any formatting added to a document on the Palm is retained in the corresponding Word document on the desktop. However, WordSmith does not understand all of the formatting that can be included within Word documents. The largest lack in this area is table support. I realize table support is difficult with the small real estate on the Palm, but tables are very prevalent in Word documents and it is possible to represent them on the Palm - Documents To Go supports them.

Unfortunately rather than retaining the tagging for the formats it doesn't understand without rendering them or allowing them to be edited, it strips these tags. That means when I sync my document back to the desktop any formatting WordSmith doesn't understand is gone. Given the lack of table support, this can really present a problem and is the biggest issue I found with Word integration.

There also is no way to delete a desktop file from the Palm; I'd like the option to delete the corresponding desktop file when I delete a file on the Palm. This is minor lack that I can definitely live with, but I would like to see this functionality added to a later version.

WordSmith is a full featured word processing application on the Palm. It provides more formatting capabilities than any other document editor including better font support, line spacing options, and the ability to control how text flows around page breaks. Any documents created in WordSmith are faithfully converted to Word on the Desktop. Because it doesn't retain formatting it doesn't understand, you need to be more careful about using WordSmith to view or edit existing Word files. I would backup any files you want to view or edit as a precaution. With the warning to be careful with your existing documents, I recommend using WordSmith if you are looking for a word processing application for your Palm and use Microsoft Word on the desktop.

Wrapping it up

This is the longest and most complex review I've ever written. Even so, I didn't touch on all of the features and functionality of WordSmith. WordSmith is a very complex application that tries to do many things for many people. If I missed your favorite or most hated feature, I apologize. Please

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