Adobe’s Acrobat.com has free content-creation tools that can help in a pinch or even be a regular part of your workday. Most of the Web-based application are collaborative, and Adobe will even host your files, so both the app and the documents can be accessed on any PC. Its great if you bounce between machines and don’t carry a USB drive.
Adobe Buzzword is a word processor, and Adobe ConnectNow handles on line meetings. Just released is presentation tool, called simply Presentations. Most of the tools require Flash 9; Presentations needs Flash10. Set up free account, log in, and work away.
With Buzzword, you can adjust fonts, formatting, and other text basics, as well as insert images. It’s also great for collaboration. As with Google Docs, you invite contacts to view or edit a file, and you can make changes at the same time. A commenting tool lets you add notations.
Buzzword imports and exports Word, Open Doc, text, and RTF files; it also exports as PDF, HTML, or .e-pub (Adobe’s e-reader format). In ConnectNow on line meetings, up to three people can share desktops and documents using the live screen casting tool. Its VoIP option handles spoken conversations a chat window works for typing and a collaborative whiteboard allows everyone to focus on the same thing.
Presentations is hosted at labs.acrobat.com because it has additional critical features coming. For example, it can’t yet export PowerPoint files a deal breaker for many small businesses. But Adobe is working on adding that option, which may come by the end oh this year.
Overall, Presentations follows the familiar slide-creation paradigm of PowerPoint.. Unlike in that office app, you can invite an unlimited number of people to view or edit the files, making Presentations a hub for both collaboration and showing slides. It exports only PDFs at the moment, if you need to use Presentations documents outside of the tool, you may want to wait until it can save as PowerPoint and other file types.
- Zack Stern
