What do Google Docs, Zoho Writer, AjaxWrite, Docly, FlyWord, Coventi Pages, Peepel Web Writer and Glide Write have in common? All are online word processors, and frankly, NONE of them are quite as good as Buzzword, a new online word processor from Virtual Ubiquity.
As opposed to almost all the other options out there, which are often less a word processor and more a glorified text editor with a few formatting functions, Buzzword is – in my opinion, at least – one of the first true word processors available to run directly from a web browser. Buzzword, amazingly, is coded in Flash, although its performance and features would not have made that my first guess.
Buzzword isn’t quite ready for prime time yet, in my view and that of the authors, which are still listing Buzzword as being a Preview of the final release. Still, there is a whole lot you can do with Buzzword, and not a lot you can’t.
One of the first things that really popped out at me when I first started using Buzzword was how simple the interface was. Most word processors have two or three rows, completely filled with tiny buttons, each button representing formatting options of some kind. Not Buzzword. Instead of the typical rows of buttons, Buzzword only has a single row, with very few options initially visible.
For instance, when I open a new document, I only see five menus, labeled Buzzword, Document, Edit, Insert, and Help. The Document menu simply lets me open an existing document, create a new one, or save the document currently being worked on, as well as setup my document page (page size, margins, etc), and the print dialog. The Edit menu has the typical copy, cut, paste, delete commands, as well as spelling and undo/redo. The Insert menu is where the user controls the insertion of images, tables, endnotes, comments, headers and footers, as well as different types of page breaks. The Help menu leads to an extensive help system, which goes over different functions and controls, as well as offering a way to contact the Buzzword developers.
Other than that, there is a green cursive “F” followed by the word Font. This is the Font toolbar. In it are six simple options: font selection, font size, bold, italics, underline and font color. That’s all. It is pretty much all the types of formatting available that directly affects the fonts in your document.
Is that all the options Buzzword has available? Hardly. If you keep looking to the right, you’ll notice a red paragraph symbol, followed by a blue numeral 1, followed by a pink representation of a graphic, a purple icon representing a table, an aqua text bubble, and a yellow sticky note. Each symbol, like the green cursive “F,” represents a new toolbar. Unlike the old-style word processors, however, Buzzword doesn’t force you to look at each and every tool available, all the time. It allows you, simply by clicking on the toolbar you want to access, to show only that, and nothing more. So, if you want to affect how Buzzword flows text around an image, simply click the pink Image toolbar button, and the current toolbar shrinks, and the new one slides into place.
Simple!
The Paragraph menu has the most options. With it, you can left-justify, center justify or right-justify your text. You can choose to have text be single spaced, 1.5 spaced or double spaced. As well, you can adjust the spacing above or below a line of text, as well as indent a block of text.
The List menu allows you to use both numbered or unnumbered lists.
The Image toolbar, such that it is, contains a single button to insert an image, which can be either GIF, JPG or PNG. Before I started using the Buzzword word processor in Linux, I was warned that the Linux “experience” was not quite finished, and apparently this is one of the areas. No matter what I did, I was unable to get an image to load, in any of the three formats. I was told that the image was either too large (it wasn’t), corrupted (not that I could see), or in the wrong format (not the case). So this is an area that needs work, at least for Linux users. The insert image feature worked quite well in Windows, on the other hand. The image loaded and was shown immediately, and I was given the chance to decide how the image should be viewed, and whether text should flow around it or not.
The table menu is simple as well. Just click the button to add a table to your document, and a table, two cells high and two columns wide will appear. To modify the table, simply click it, then click again on the upper-right corner button to add a column, or the lower-left button to add a row. If you need finer control over the table, click anywhere on the upper or left border, and a tiny gray circle with a white triangle will appear. Click this, and you’ll see the entire list of options you have available to you.
The Comment toolbar is a nice feature. If your document is available for others to view, you can choose to show (or not), comments that others have made, simply by clicking the button with the three white dialog bubbles. To add your own comment (which will then show up along the right border of the Buzzword space), click the single, large white dialog bubble. The comment that appears will be “attached” to the word you were closest to when you initiated the comment. Each comment shows who made the comment (and when), and can be dismissed by clicking the trash can in the bottom-right corner of the comment. This is different than simply making all comments invisible.
Finally, there is the yellow sticky note, which is actually not a menu at all, but takes you to the Buzzword document storage area, where you can see all the documents you have on hand. Documents can be arranged by name, by author, by size, by date last viewed, or by what your “role” regarding the document is. Since documents can be shared, a person has to have an identifiable “role” which simply means how much access to the document the user has. If a document was originated by me, I am the author. I can designate one or more people as co-authors, which means that those people have the exact same privileges I do, as far as editing, saving, and deleting. A reviewer is someone who can read the article and comment on it via the comments system, and a reader is someone who can do just that… read the article and nothing else.
All throughout the Buzzword interface are neat little capabilities. Are you bad at spelling? Buzzword automatically marks words it isn’t sure about, and they end up near the bottom of the window. Just look for the head of Venus de Milo (more about her later), and you’ll see a number, underlined in red. Click that number and you’ll be taken to the spot in the document where the flagged word appears. From here you can mark the word as always being okay, as being okay only within this particular document, or – if Buzzword thinks it might know what you MEANT to type – a list of options.
Back to the head of Venus de Milo. It represents History, as in the document’s history. Since Buzzword documents can be shared among many readers, editors and co-authors, Buzzword realizes that there is the potential for mass chaos. So, Buzzword, without any user intervention, periodically takes a “snapshot” of the document, and saves it. Click on the History icon, and you’ll be shown a list of all the revisions available to view. Click on a revision “dot” and you’ll immediately be taken to the document as it existed at that time.
So… that’s Buzzword! As I mentioned a couple of places, Buzzword isn’t QUITE ready to be used every day, at least in my opinion. There were a couple of times (using Linux), when I was unable to type for a moment. Clicking away from the web browser and back again often did the trick, but occasionally I was forced to close the document and reopen it. Also, as mentioned, there were some issues uploading images. Whether this was a Linux issue or a Firefox issue remains to be seen. Additionally, the font selection as it sits right now, is rather small. Users can choose from Adobe Garamond Pro, Courier Standard, Cronos Pro, Minion Pro, Myriad Pro, New Gothic Standard, and Tekton Pro. All are nice-looking fonts, but I think most users will appreciate more choices (even if those choices are often redundant!).
Finally, the issue of formats. It would have been GREAT to see Buzzword support open formats and standards, and it does, soft of, but not to the extent it could have. For instance, Buzzword is only able to save documents in Microsoft’s .doc or .docx formats, or the fairly standard .rtf format. It is unable to save as plain text, and offers no export to .pdf or .html, which other online word processors offer. In addition, the newest standard word processing format, OpenDocument, which is supported by Google Docs (among others), is not available. These could, I suppose, show up when Buzzword gets closer to being “final,” but at the moment are missing.
Still, in spite of all its shortcomings, Buzzword is easily the best online word processor I’ve ever used. It’s fast, friendly, full of features, and with a few exceptions, everything I would want (or need) from a word processor. Great job!
