The Buzzword team updated our servers today with our 14th release. And, the theme of this version is Easier Document Sharing.
We get a lot of feedback from our users, and at the top of the list has been the request to make our document sharing easier, and more public. So we’ve tackled both problems. Now it’s not only easier to share documents with teams but also publish to the whole world.
Here’s a sample (this blog entry) as a Buzzword open access document.
Publishing Documents to a Wider World
Many have written to ask us to make it easier to “publish” a document to anyone regardless of whether they have a Buzzword account or an official invitation. In response, we’re now offering a new sharing option, Share with a wider audience.
If you click Share with a wider audience, you get choices of roles or permissions as well as a link that you can copy and paste into another document or an e-mail or a blog or a web site or…. Now anyone with this URL can access your document – no signup, no account, no official invitation needed.
Managing Sharing Lists
Say you work with the same group of people and find it tiresome to have to pick each name off the contact list one at a time. Or, perhaps you want to ping all of the people on a particular document’s sharing list.
Now, next to the share button is a context menu button. Click it and you’ll now find a few new choices:
- Clear Sharing List removes everyone from the sharing bar, leaving you as the only one with access to the document. This also clears ‘Share with a wider audience.’
- Copy Sharing List copies all of the contacts on the collaboration bar to your clipboard.
- Paste Sharing List opens the Sharing Dialog and prompts you to paste a previously copied list from any other application. Just make sure there are commas or semi-colons separating the addresses. Voilà! The sharing list is populated.
- Send Email to Sharing List does just that. Opens your email client, populates the address list and puts the document name and URL link into the body of the document.
Open Document Text Import
Buzzword has been exporting to ODT for a while now. With this release we now import ODT documents as well. We hope this encourages all our friends who use OpenOffice.org to bring Buzzword into their workflows.
Non-Breaking Spaces
Et, allons, pour nos amis français, nous avons les non-breaking spaces. (And now, for our French friends, we have non-breaking spaces. If you need them, you know what they are.) To access non-breaking spaces, use the keyboard or the Insert Special Character command from the menu.
More to come
This is the last release for 2008, but be assured, we continue to push forward and should have a pretty cool New Year’s gift early next year with even bigger ones later. Stay tuned.
Rick Treitman and the Buzzword Team
Comments
i think you should add support for iwork ’08 users
pages, numbers, and keynote
it would make this a lot cooler
Great job Buzzword Team, keep up the good work. Love the new features!
Thanks for adding odt import, it certainly makes life easier.
Any hints as to the New Year’s gift?
I have only used Buzzword once, so may not have yet explored or properly found all of its features, but found no hyperlink feature or recognition of html to make active links inside a document – am I right or wrong? If this is the case, then maybe that would be a nice New Year’s gift??
Also I could not find any cut and paste feature to use while creating a doc. Again, maybe I missed it – but if not available, would also make a nice addition.
Having said the above, I realise Buzzword is not a fully fledged word processing programme and there has to be a limit. Great programme and lots of fun to use. Well done!
Hey guys, just some quick feature suggestions – provide access to the dictionary, so that approved words words can be removed. This would be great.
[From the Buzzword Team: you can edit the word list today. Click on the Buzzword logo/menu, select Settings & Preferences, and click on edit word list link next to the spelling dictionary selection.]
But more important would be an interface improvement – move the incorrectly spelt words to the top of the pop-up menu, and the permanently approve item to the very bottom. I have so many time permanently approved words, and it is extremely annoying.
On the whole though, the product rocks – very slick