In the process of testing Adobe Buzzword, I decided to use it to write the entirety of this piece. Buzzword is the free, online word processing software from the same guys who make Acrobat and Photoshop. You can access it Acrobat.com, which is one of the best constructed sites I’ve seen in a while. Sign-up is a quick process via a little window that pops up in the rest of the very sexy Flash interface.
Buzzword itself is also very well designed. Everything just feels snappy, but without all the corner cutting we see in a lot of other online applications. For example, contrary to the big white page that Google Docs displays, Buzzword has a very nice layout. Everything is very obviously placed. There’s a bar at the top with versions of all the classics we expect from local programs, such as Document (their version of the File button), Edit, Help, and so on. We also get the nifty features we can come expect, such as text formatting, page layout, making lists, and even annotations and comments, which are way easier to do in Buzzword than even in Microsoft Word (for anyone who cares, both Microsoft and Google are considered typos by Buzzword’s spellcheck).
Sharing documents is also pretty easy. You just click Share and type in the email addresses of the people you want viewing the document. If you want someone to be able to edit the document, you can check the Author box next to his name. A little status bar at the bottom shows who is editing the document and who is viewing it.
The one thing for which I will fault Buzzword is its lack of browser support. If you’re on Mac, it’ll work with Safari, Internet Explorer, and on Windows it supports the latter two. There’s nothing to say whether or not it supports Linux, though I would suspect Firefox works across all platforms. But still, I would like to be able to use Google Chrome.
Despite the compatibility issue, Buzzword is easily the best word processing software online right now. It may not have much by way of competition, but it still feels like the developers behind it didn’t rush it out the gates. Everything feels very polished and very intuitive. You’ll probably never spend time wondering how to do anything as it all makes a lot of sense, and making sense is one of the best things a program can do.
