First Look: Adobe Buzzword

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Posted on 3 Oct 2007 at 14:20

You can barely open your browser nowadays without another free online office app emerging. Google recently launched its Presentation application, adding to its existing Docs and Spreadsheet tools; IBM unveiled its Lotus Symphony suite, and Microsoft gave us Office Live Workspace.

Not wishing to be left out of this rapidly expanding party, Adobe has bought online word processor, Buzzword, to complement its new Spaces service, which will allow people to edit and store up to 1GB of Adobe files online.

Polished performer

The first thing that strikes you about Buzzword is its highly-polished flash interface. Most online word processors resemble a mid-90s version of Microsoft Word, but Buzzword has a modern, smartly animated look.

It's far less cluttered than its competitors thanks to its Ribbon-like menu. There's a simple, icon-based bar above the editing area, which allows you to select sub-menus by clicking the appropriate icon. Click on the font icon, for example, and a formatting menu will slide out with a pleasing animation.

While some web applications can feel sluggish, Buzzword is refined and responsive, despite the overhead of animated menus. Photos are easily resized by dragging the corners of the image box, and text instantly flows in around the edges.

There's a thin selection of seven fonts to choose from, but most of these are a cut above the normal Times New Roman and Arial, providing the elegance you'd expect from a professional publishing company such as Adobe. As a result, documents look very attractive - a marked improvement over anything you could produce with Google Docs, for example.

Buzzword handles images and tables with aplomb

Limited features

Although Buzzword is a fairly simple application, there are a few clever features present, such as shared editing and commenting. Users can easily place comments anywhere on the document, making group editing viable. A neatly implemented History feature also allows you to revert to previous saved versions of the document, should you accidentally delete text during an edit.

The spellcheck works well, dynamically highlighting incorrect words as Office and Google Docs do, but clicking on the red underline to select alternatives is fiddly.

Text is also highlighted in a very pale colour, making it difficult to see precisely what is selected. Both of these are small issues though, and do little to detract from the impressive interface and even more impressive document quality.

The site will import and export documents in RTF, Word, and Word 2003 XML files, which is an adequate but hardly exhaustive list. Adobe has stated that it plans to include support for PDF files in the future, and ODF/OOXML formats would be welcome additions.

Server struggles

While Buzzword is a web application, it's designed to function offline, although saving is impossible without an internet connection because files are stored on Adobe's servers. Unfortunately we found that saving files with an internet connection was often impossible, too.