If you want to create and edit free Microsoft Word documents (.DOC and .DOCX formats) and want to save them and download them as Word documents or PDF documents, then Adobe Buzzword is a good place to do that online. Adobe is a reputed name in software sector and now it provides you this free option to create documents online. At the time of writing this article, Buzzword is in the Beta version.
Buzzword is a new web-based, collaborative word processor built on Adobe’s Flash platform. It allows you to create, edit, save online, export / download, and print your documents. It also makes online sharing of documents with others, an easy operation. You don’t have to install any software to run this word-processor, since it runs online on Adobe’s servers directly from within your browser.
You require Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or 7.0 or Firefox 3.0 browsers or higher versions to run it on a Windows computer. On Apple Macintosh OS X 10.4 or 10.5, you’ll need Safari 3.1 or 3.2 or Firefox 3.0 or higher version browsers to use Buzzword.
Have a look at the following sample document that I created with Adobe Buzzword that also shows its interface:
Save documents online and share them online or download to your computer:
Buzzword will save the document created or edited by you on the secured Adobe servers and not on your computer. But, you can download the document to your computer anytime by exporting it to your computer. Moreover, the document being available online means that you can access your document from anywhere from any computer using an Internet connection.
Due to the documents being saved online and being always available online, Buzzword is especially useful for publishing and enabling collaboration between colleagues and students, for creating, editing and sharing documents, for peer-editing, editorial review, teacher-student exchanges and group efforts, etc.
Free online account and 5GB free online storage space for your documents:
To start using Adobe Buzzword, you can create a free online account using any of your email addresses. It took me just a minute to create and verify my new account to use Buzzword. Buzzword offers you 5GB free space online that can be used to create hundreds of thousands of documents online and for sharing them with others. Moreover, with Adobe, you can be sure of the safety of your documents.
File formats:
Buzzword supports several file formats. You can create new documents or import documents from your computer or export the online documents to your computer in the plain text (TXT), Rich Text Format (RTF), Microsoft Word (DOC and DOCX), Word 2003 XML, and OpenOffice (ODT) format files. Moreover, Buzzword also allows you to export your documents to PDF, HTML, and ePub (a standard eBook format recommended by the International Digital Publishing Forum) formats. Thus, you can easily save / download your online Buzzword documents to your computer in Microsoft Word (2007 format or earlier) or PDF formats by exporting them to your computer. But, currently you cannot import a PDF file from your computer to Buzzword.
Word-processing features:
While Buzzword may not have all the rich / advanced features of Microsoft Word, it offers most of the word-processing features that you may generally require for your documents. You can have different font types, font sizes, font colors, background colors, paragraph formatting for your text. You can insert tables, insert images, insert lists, and insert comments in your documents.
You can create bulleted lists, numbered lists, or checklists with many customization features. You can import images in the JPEG, PNG, and GIF formats into your document and then you can use easy-to-use tools for sizing and placing these images in your document and the text will automatically flow around them.
You can also add comments to any document. In fact, a different color is used for comments made by each reviewer, which makes it easy to distinguish the comments.
Spell-check and language support:
Buzzword supports 19 languages and has separate online language dictionaries for them. You can set your default language. It supports spell-check facility in all these 19 languages.
Version history:
In Buzzword, you can easily revert to any earlier version of a document, since it automatically keeps a record of the recent changes made to the document. This allows you to view and compare changes across different versions of the same document.
Role-based access control:
You can share your documents online with anyone you want. You can decide the role of each person with whom you want to share the document and accordingly fix the level of access. It can be of three types: co-author, reviewer, or reader.
In fact, you can allow anyone to view your document online without the need for an Acrobat account. However, for commenting on a document, a viewer will have to sign in to his Acrobat account.
Printed documents will look perfectly like they look on screen:
Adobe has the proven expertise in printing documents as they appear on the screen. They have the PDF technology. So, expectedly, you can print your document exactly in the same way as you see it on the screen. Fonts, letter spacing, colors, and graphics, etc., will all get printed as appearing on the screen.
To conclude, Adobe Buzzword has most of the features required of a good word-processing software without there being any need to install a software on your computer or pay for that. Without spending a lot of money for buying Microsoft Word (or Microsoft Office), you can create a Word document online and then save it on your computer if needed. Many of the Microsoft Word features, though not all, are supported. Moreover, you can also export / download / convert your document in PDF form or ePub format for eBooks. Plus, you get 5 GB free online storage space for your documents. And, the Adobe security. Being a free service, you should make use of Adobe Buzzword if you’re used to being online.
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