QJot

When it comes to programs that can handle text documents, it's a balancing act: sometimes you need more functionality than bare-bones text editors like Notepad can offer, but full-featured word processors can be too big and bloated, especially for portable use. Qjot is the best of both worlds, with the slimness of a text editor but many of the basic features of a word processor. It's a great choice if you need a way to work with documents on the go.

The program's interface is plain and intuitive, with menus and a couple of toolbars across the top. There are formatting tools including text alignment, bulleting, word wrap, and indentation, as well as options for text and background color. Important word-processing tools like word count and find and replace are here, and there's even a link to take users directly to online dictionaries. Perhaps most importantly, Qjot lets users insert images and other objects into documents with ease. The program supports a variety of file formats, including RTF and DOC files. There's no Help file, but this isn't a huge problem; anyone who's used a word processor before will be quite familiar with Qjot's features. Overall, we found Qjot to be a great alternative to bigger (and pricier) word processors; it has the features that most people use most of the time, without useless extras. And at 606KB, the program can easily fit on a USB drive for portable use.

Qjot comes as a ZIP file and is accessible after extraction with no need for installation.