Adobe Online Tools for Documents and Presentations

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 Webbased applications are collaborative, and Adobe will even host your files, so both the app and the documents can be accessed on any Pc. It's great if you bounce between machines and don't carry a USB drive. Adobe Buzzword is a word processor, and Adobe ConnectNow handles online meetings. Just released is a presentation tool, called simply Presentations. Most of the tools require Flash 9; Presentations needs Flash 10. Set up a 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 3dd notations.

Buzzword imports and exports Word, Open Doc, t ext, and RTF files; it also exports as PDF, HTML, or .epub (Adobe'S e-reader format). In Connct:tNow online meetings, up to three people can share desktops and documents using the live screen casting tool. Its VolP option handles spoken conversations-a chat window works for typing-and 3 collaborative whiteboard allows everyone to focus on the same thing. A presentation 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 of 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 3 hub for both collaboration and showing slides.

ACROBAT.COM'S BUZZWORD-one 01 the site's hosted
content-creation and collaboration apps-lets
you or a workgroup develop and format documents.

Source of Information : PC World August 2009