The New Buzzword

David Pierce out at The 2.0 World asserts that it is the best online word processor he has ever seen so I signed up for Adobe Buzzword. I write this post using this new online word processor - making observations as I notice them.

The interface is very different from good old Microsoft Word or its online lookalike, Google Docs. I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it certainly will take some getting used to. A first impression is that it gives you the feeling that you are working on a software (Flash it is - it's from Adobe, after all), which one doesn't get with MS Word, probably on account of constant exposure. The alt-text when you place your mouse over the tool bar icons is very distracting as well - may be one can turn it off, may be one should be able to. And having page numbers on the scroll bar is another thing one needs to get used to.

The dictionary seems to be slightly dated - if it gives me Squiggles for Microsoft and Google, I can attribute a competitive killer instinct, but am veered to think that is not quite the reason.

With MS Word, a right-click on a Squiggle is the way to go. Not so with Buzzword. For each Squiggle, you need to hover over it and click to elicit a dropdown from which you can choose. There are no right-click activities on this software - a big re-learning that.

The spelling suggestions you get here are not as many (and therefore not as amusing) as in MS Word - I suppose this will build itself over time and use. The interesting part is the text it uses for the MS equivalents of Add to Dictionary and Ignore All - " is ok always" and " is "ok in this document". Quaint and unnecessarily verbose, methinks.

One of the cooler and useful little features of MS Word is the auto-capitalization it does for sentence starters and the perpendicular pronoun - not on Buzzword. One more handy feature in MS Word (and not in Buzzword) is that it converts hyphens into en-dashes automatically (except for some fonts). Another missing feature - word counts for selected blocks of text.

The font library is also very limited - just seven fonts. This also means restrictions in the basket of special characters. Font size options also get limited because you cannot type the font size directly - Flash, remember?

Inserting tables and images was a breeze and they wrapped around pretty well. If there is an easy way to add titles to images / tables and some way of auto-numbering them, that could be a great help. The ease with which you can add columns or rows to tables is particularly noteworthy. The checklist feature (in lists) is another nifty aspect - small but very useful.

Versioning seems to be perhaps the best feature of this - the Version History feature saves the document automatically at different intervals and you can access any version with just one click. May be this explains the absence of a track-change feature. The comment feature is perennially available on screen, and is quite neat as well. Being an online tool, collaboration is an automatic feature. I wish I could have published this directly on to my blog from here.

Overall, on first use, it does not appear to be too bad a tool, though the functionalities seem far more limited and usability is a bit of an issue. Considering that it is Flash and it is online, it takes some time to save as well. I am not moving away from MS Word in a hurry. If the current recession means slipping over to a free tool, I reckon I'll consider it, but can I ignore Google Docs? And oh yes, Buzzword does not work on Google Chrome. So that settles it then.