All right, we’re serious this time. (I think.) Forget emailing papers to yourself due to “can I open this at school” compatibility fears. Forget the cut-and-paste dance with Google Docs to preserve formatting, proper margins, and other stuff pesky teachers require.
Behold, the majesty of Buzzword, Adobe’s brand-spankin’-new Flash-based online word processor:
This is the new champion, kids. It’s got a beautiful, smooth interface, and will do everything you need for school: headers and footers, automatic page numbers, double-spacing, adjustable margins… there’s a word-count and spell-checker. It has a small but elegant collection of basic fonts to choose from, and looks like it handles inserting pictures and tables simply and well. As with other online writers, you can invite collaborators and leave comments.
Buzzword will open .rtf files and Microsoft Word documents (.doc files) from your hard drive, if you’ve got stuff you’ve been working on and want to import. It saves automatically as you’re working, and an icon in the corner shows if you’ve made changes since the last save.
The best bit, of course, is that your work is saved online: start a paper at home, go to school, log in to Buzzword, finish it up, and print it out. No worries about disks, drives, emails, etc. 🙂
All you need to do is pick a username and plug in an email address and password, and you’re ready to go. Go check it out!