Acrobat.com Part 2…

So last night we covered Buzzword and some other generalities of Acrobat.com. Now we are going to move on to Tables and Presentations. I feel like Adobe started off very strong with a product call Buzzword. They follow that up with products named Tables and Presentations. I feel like those names are very weak. However, I will also note that both of these products are still in the Adobe Labs, meaning they are still adding features and other stuff to them. Perhaps when they graduate to full-on products they will get cool little monikers.

Tables aka ‘PowerGrid (TM)’

Adobe marketing department, lend me your ears: Name this product PowerGrid and then toss me a few bucks for my troubles. And don’t worry, I’ve got a suggestion for Presentations as well. Look for that further down the page.

Now, The Digitante is probably one of the few people around who use Microsoft Excel enough to have a laundry list of complaints a mile long.

One of my biggest complaints has always been Excel’s locking of in-use files. I understand that if two people were editing a file at the same time, very bad things could happen. However, a forward-thinking, innovative company would figure out a way that two people could work in harmony on one file:

• Show cells being edited in glowing red.
• Lock only the page the other person is working one.
• Have screen sharing.

Instead, you end up with a file that is locked and can’t be used until the idiot two cubes over gets back to his desk and closes the file he was working on before he headed off for lunch an hour ago. Or sometime you get extra lucky and end up with a file that is locked even though no one is using it. How does THAT happen?

Adobe addressed this issue in their new offerings. The focus of these products is collaboration. In order to aid that, they included a bar at the bottom of each product that shows who is allowed to work on or view each document. Standard disclaimer that some of the following pictures may have been taken from the Acrobat.com product guide or from the site itself.

As you can see, you can click the “Share” button to add other users and you can see each person’s status. The dot next to their name will be yellow if they are currently viewing it and it will be red if they are currently editing it. The switch between viewing and editing is seamless as it indicates editing when you start typing and viewing about 2 second after you finish.

The roles for users consist of Co-Authors who have editing privileges, Reviewers who can comment, and Readers who can only read the document.

Another simple task that is turned into a terrible chore in Excel is inserting a row or a column. Unless you have added a toolbar button (and even that is still way up top), you are required to click in a cell, right click for the context menu, click on ‘Insert…’, click on row, and click Ok. In Tables, you click the cell and click the + sign on the start of the row. 5 vs. 2 is a huge improvement.

The view tool is also pretty cool. When collaborating on a spreadsheet, you can create your own views. These views are created using filters. When you create those views, they don’t affect any other users viewing the documents. An excellent example of this feature would be sharing a document with data about various regions during a ConnectNow session (Adobe’s online conference tool). Each regional manager could have his own private view up, filtered for his region.

Presentations aka ‘ElectricSlide (TM)’

Unfortunately, at this point, Presentations is really missing that killer feature that the other products have such as image manipulation and page layout in Buzzword and private view in Tables. As I mentioned before, this is still in it’s Labs phase and may be more fleshed out when it becomes more official.

Two big upsides for Presentations:

• There are tons of beautiful, eye-catching themes and color schemes.
• When you toss videos into a presentation, they are saved as Flash movies and are guaranteed to play. No dead links, no wrong format errors.

Overall impressions?

I think Adobe is on the right path. They have really tried to get some innovation into some products that Microsoft has been entrenched in for years with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. The innovation pays off for the end user by making Adobe’s products more usable.

On the other hand, Adobe has their work cut out for them. As great as I think their products are, it has to be tough to try and step into an arena with Goliaths like Google and Microsoft who have been working hard on their office productivity offerings.

I’ll mention again, if you think Acrobat.com might be a useful tool and you want to try it out. Or if you are currently using Acrobat.com and have had positive or negative experiences, I’d love to know that as well. I would be more than happy to post your thoughts here on the site for the world to see. You can always contact The Digitante through the About page or you can click over to the right on the Google Voice widget.

Acrobat.com…

I had mentioned a couple of days ago that I had a web meeting with some Adobe people to discuss their Acrobat.com web tools. Their online collaboration tool includes a word processor called Buzzword, a Powerpoint-like tool called Presentations, and a spreadsheet tool called Tables. Note that Presentations and Tables are currently in their testing phase and you have to head to the Labs area to access them. Tying all these tools together is an online meeting room software called Adobe ConnectNow.

I’ll be covering these over the next few days with tonight’s post covering some generalities as well as Buzzword.

The pictures that follow are going to be a combination of screenshots from the website and pictures from a brochure that was given to me by the Adobe marketing guys.

This all looks very familiar

Adobe contacted me in response to my post about Google Docs. Google Docs provides a very similar offering with one major exception: Adobe ConnectNow. Google is currently working on Wave, but currently Wave is only offering a very limited number of invites. At this point you can sign up and begin using ConnectNow, umm… now.

All these tools, as would make sense, are entirely built using Adobe Flash. This has it’s positives and negatives. On the upside, it is platform independent. If you have flash, you can use these tools. Flash is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux and hopefully next year will be moving to cellphones (except for iPhone users). On the downside, Flash can be resource intensive and crashy. Hopefully Adobe has some tricks to keep Flash from being too crashy, especially when working with documents. I’d hate to see a night of working on a term paper wiped into oblivion.

Buzzword

I don’t think the word processing aspect of Buzzword needs much covering. It offers the typical formatting, pagination, image tools, and commenting of most word processors.

However, in one area that I tested out, Buzzword ran circles around both Word and Google Documents: image manipulation. Buzzword allowed me to move the picture and the text would flow around it as I moved in real-time. In the other two programs, the image would stay put and a cursor would denote where the image would land. Once the mouse was released, the image would move, but it was a crapshoot on how the text would wrap around the image.

The image manipulation is just an extreme case of what Adobe has done well. They have laid the document out on the screen EXACTLY as it will look when it prints. If you’ve ever tried to change indenting, move between fields of differently formatted text, or messed around with bullet points in Word, you know the frustration of suddenly having your bullet point numbering start over or your entire paragraph suddenly bold and italics just because you hit backspace.

I’m really glad Adobe nailed this one. Markup from programs like Word are useful for those doing complex projects but it is overly complicated and frustrating for the basic user.

Another beautiful feature that also applies to Tables and Presentations is the use of a version history. Don’t like the changes you made? Roll them back to a point in the past before you made those changes. If you have multiple people working on a single document, you can even see their past changes to the document as well.

Are you excited to hear more?

Too bad! You are going to have to wait till tomorrow when we dig into Tables and Presentations. In the meantime, you can check out Acrobat.com and sign up for an account. Let me know if you would be willing to test it out with me and give feedback. You could earn yourself 15 minutes of fame on The Digitante blog.

If you want to learn more about how you can use Acrobat.com, feel free to contact me by heading to the About page and sending me an email. Or you can simply click the Google Voice widget and talk with me on the phone.

Google Docs…

Microsoft Office owns a lion-share of the word processing (Word), spreadsheet (Excel), and presentation software (PowerPoint) market. These tools have great feature sets and can perform tasks from the mundane to the complex. There were a number of drawbacks to Microsoft Office, including the big two: file sharing and the cost.

Google Docs has managed to cure these two woes and added a bunch of other common, useful features.

The common stuff

Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations have similar options as their Microsoft counterparts:

• Documents – Inserting images, links, and tables; print preview; headers and footers; spellcheck; texting formatting.
• Spreadsheets – Inserting and deleting rows/columns; comments; formula toolbar; formatting rules; solve and validate data.
• Presentations – Themes; speaker notes; inserting images, links, and tables; slide import from PowerPoint.

Google Docs’ first big win: file sharing

Since Google Docs, much like Gmail and Google Calendar, is all online, you can access your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations from any computer with access to the internet. This allows you to focus on other things rather than figuring out if you have the most recent version of the file on your thumb drive or saved in your email.

Not only do you have online access to your files, but you can switch your files from Private to Public or share them with certain other users.

As you can see, you can directly email people to let them know they have permission to edit and collaborate on your documents. Additionally, you can get a link directly to the document that could be posted to your blog. After all this, you can also check and see who has access to your document and what type of permission they have, either editing or viewing. You can also make the document private again so no one can see it.

Google Docs’ second big win: cost

For the most basic version of Microsoft Office, you are looking at spending $150. Fortunately, access to Google Docs is free. For most basic, non-work tasks, there are no features that you are going to be missing. A few that could be missed if you work on more advanced projects would be mail merge in Word and macros and Visual Basic in Excel.

Even in the event that you need a feature that Google Docs is missing, you still don’t need to purchase Microsoft Office.

You may remember that we have talked in the past about open-source software. OpenOffice.org is a robust, free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. The below screenshot is from the OpenOffice.org website. You can see that it is very similar to Microsoft Word 2005. OpenOffice will be getting the new Word ribbon style bar in it’s next iteration.

Get collaborating

If you would like to get started with Google Docs or would like to know how to use some of the features of documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, be sure to head to the About page. Once there you can find contact information for The Digitante. Feel free to send an email or call with your questions.