Buzzword, now that’s what I call a "Word Processor"

December 4th, 2007

Google Docs, Zoho Writer and now Adobe Buzzword. Since the start of the rise of online document editors, I always asked myself, why those websites do not use flash instead of Ajax and I still don’t really get it. I always thought "FLASH" would be better and faster. I know that "Live Documents" will also use the FLASH technology.

Adobe Buzzword although came a bit late to the game, but there are couple or more things that makes it better than the others. Obviously being in FLASH is the first that comes to mind, it really makes it super fast. Buzzword is far more simpler and easy on the eye’s too. It works on any operating system, your computer just needs to have Adobe Flash installed, which is available in most computers by default anyway.

To read a full review click More…

As soon as you finish your registration you are quickly switched to the main page. In the main page you can basically either create a new document, open a saved document in Buzzword or open a document from your harddisk.

The beauty of Buzzword, being in flash, the menus are smooth and fast. And nicely organized, and on your first look you would get the wrong impression that BUZZWORD lacks features and options.

But you will be very mistaken to think so, just click on any of the icons and it will slide revealing various features. The picture below shows some of them.

We shouldn’t forget the pull down menus too, which also hold a number of different kind of options.

The "History" feature keeps track of different changes that you make on a document so you can switch between them easily.

In Buzzword you can also insert Pictures and Comments.

Document sharing, you can make a document private or share it with others in a very simple way, setting a role for the person you are sharing the document with. There are three roles. Co-Author where he can do anything with the document, Reviewer where he can read and comment on the document, and Reader where he is only allowed to read the document.

There are other great features also, such as Zooming, using a slidebar you can zoom the document in and out which automatically resize everything in it.  You can also insert special characters, and Offcourse, the automatic word count is useful when you are limited to number of words.

Now that is all great stuff in BUZZWORD, but there are couple of things that I found negative in it, nothing is perfect in this world. Anyway, the first thing that bothered me is the limited number of fonts available, which are only seven fonts.

The second thing is what happens sometimes when you upload a picture, it took me three tries to upload an image, a message keeps coming up stating that "Buzzword could not contact the server to complete our action". I tried doing this using IE, Firefox, FLOCK which is Firefox anyway, and I tried it from my Toshiba G30 Notebook and My Desktop PC. Sometimes the image is uploaded from the first time, but the error window do appear quite often.

For a full help guide for Buzzword Click Here.

In the end I would like to say that Adobe Buzzword is a good, easy and fast Word Processor. Couple of enhancements here and there and it will defiantly become THE web REAL Word Processor.

Sphere: Related Content

Entry Filed under: Tech

Tags: adobe, buzzword, comment, comments, computer, create, docs, documents, download, features, flash, fonts, google, google docs, history, insert, live documents, office, online, processor, share, sharing, Tech, technology, tools, upload, web, word, word count, writer, zoho, zoho writer, zoom