Adobe’s Online Word Editor: Buzzword Review

Adobe acquired Virtual Ubiquity on October 1st of this year and welcomed Buzzword into the Adobe family. According to Adobe Buzzword will be built on the cross operating system runtime codenamed AIR and eventually be integrated into Adobe’s online document collaboration services.

What is Buzzword?

In simple terms Buzzword is an online word processor. It has a nice interface and interactive design.

Adobe explains Buzzword as … Buzzword is a web-based, highly collaborative word processor built on the ubiquitous Adobe Flash® platform, including prototype support for Adobe AIR to allow for offline work. Buzzword stores files online so they are available in a single repository for document collaboration.

A Closer Look At Buzzword

After logging into Buzzword the following dashboard is seen. This lists all the documents saved under that profile and gives the option to sort documents: alphabetically, by author, by your role in editing the document, last viewed, last edited or file size. These are some nice sorting options to have when compared with Google Docs which lack them.

From the dashboard one click on the document shows properties at a glance which include date created, changed, viewed and length in pages.

When you open an existing document your will see it on a dark background aligned to the left. By default the system uses Minion Pro font which keeps the text easy on the eyes.

The top left of the document shows the editing toolbar which allows for the basic features such as a few fonts, size, bold-italics-underline and color controls. The top right of the document window reveals a few more features such as paragraph, creating a list, inserting an image, table and comments.

Sharing a document is quite easy. On the bottom left of the document click share, enter the recipients email and their role in editing the document. Analyzing changes made in the file is simple as well. Click history icon on the bottom right (looks like a statue) and browse through document change log. The same location also provides at-a-glance word count, number of flagged words, zoom and connection status.

One of the most surprising things about Buzzword that I have noticed is that it can import MS Word and XML files but not PDF or ODF. Adobe says they will add that functionality later on but being an Adobe product I expected in beta release the service would fully support the famous Adobe PDF format.

Conclusion

Buzzword is one of many online word processors. It will be competing directly against Google Docs, Zoho and several other services which have gained quite a few users. Most of these services are free, at least for personal use, and it will be difficult for Adobe to make inroads into this crowded market arriving fairly late in the game. But if Adobe manages to integrate this product well into their online services lineup then Buzzword definitely has a lot of potential. Overall Buzzword is a solid product and anyone interested in online word editors should definitely take a look.