Looking for an online word processing application but you don't fancy Google Docs, Zoho Writer, or ThinkFree? Adobe has launched a public beta of Buzzword. Previously, you could only access the online writing/collaborating application with an invitation.

Buzzword is a slick web application that looks unlike any other word processor we've sen. It supports tables, images and page breaks. You can create and store documents online, share them with other users, print or download them. The one thing you can't do is insert hyperlinks in a document.

[via Digital Inspiration]

Web based office apps are great if you need to collaborate with other people or if you need to access your documents from multiple computers. But sometimes you don't want to fire up your web browser if all you need to do is add a few numbers to your spreadsheet. TechCrunch reports that an answer is just around the corner. And it has nothing to do with Google Docs/Google Gears.

Transmedia is the company behind the Glide Sync application suite that lets you synchronize and edit documents on multiple computers and mobile devices. Tomorrow Transmedia is set to launch Glide Crunch, a spreadsheet app to complement its existing word processor, presentation, calendar, contacts, and e-mail apps. While each of Glide's existing services is web-based, Glide Crunch will be a desktop program that lets you synchronize data with a web spreadsheet application.

While Google Spreadsheet only supports 100,000 cells and up to 40 sheets in a document, Glide Crunch documents can have an unlimited number of sheets and up to 16.7 million cells. Glide provides 2GB of storage for free to customers, while you'll have to pay a monthly fee if you need more space.

Small business travelers depend on out-of-office technology and are frustrated at almost every turn in using it when they need it the most. Having a great notebook is one thing; having a table to put it on so you can type apparently is another.

What are the travel frustrations for business users and what can they do about it?

Most travel challenges involve not having a decent place to use your notebook. Airplane travelers are shunted into tiny seats with seat backs that, if not in the upright condition, prevent you from lifting the top to see the screen. Want to check the seating configuration and potential screen room? SeatGuru is the hub for finding exact seating specs on all major airlines. Today you have to know the plane model to see the seat map, limited or full recline, reduced legroom, misaligned windows, in-seat power port locations and where the head is. The color coding on SeatGuru's graphics is invaluable.

As an infrequent flyer who'd rather take the train if it went where I needed to go, the best part of train travel is the big wide seat with lots of legroom and an electric outlet at hand. SeatMaestro provides airline seating information plus if and where electric outlets are available on your flight. Find your plane type here and then look for the power and other resources. You can review an assortment of airplane power adapters for PCs and Apple's to-die-for accessory: the AirPort Express Base Station that creates a wireless network from any broadband network – a common hotel and conference room setup.

Hotel wifi can make or break your stay and not all wifi is equal. In fact, you better check out where in the hotel your room is to get the best reception and some hotels have problems connecting certain brands of computers. Dell's wireless card is a known issue with some hotel chains' wifi. HotelChatter has an annual report of the best and worst wifi hotels. They even compiled a wifi heaven, or the best of the best hotel wifi. Did you know that corner rooms often provide the best wireless reception?

Worse than for-pay hotel wireless is having nowhere to plug in your computer or other toys. How many times have you tried to move a bed that's nailed to the wall just a couple of inches so you can recharge your mobile technology? Hint: pack an extension cord with a multi-plug for hotels that skimp on the reachable outlets or consider a Solio charger for under $80. It's easier than trying to pack your own lamp to pump up the dim lighting many hotels provide in the official room workspace.

Speaking of workspace, airports used to have small workstation areas with a telephone, table and chairs for a traveler's convenience. Nowadays, business travelers are often strewn all over the floor (usually near electrical outlets) trying to use their airport dead time to do something productive. Say "airport wireless" to a business traveler and step back in anticipation of the tirade:

• Why don't all airports have wifi and why isn't it all free?
• Why do I have to pay three different wireless carriers on a single trip with one plane change?
• Why do I have to sit outside a private club to catch seeping wifi?

Find airports with wireless connectivity and pricing (if not free) at TravelPost. Their guide includes 219 airports with wireless connections and free wifi.

If you're a serious business traveler, you might want to attend the Travel Technology Show in London, February 5-6 , 2008. If you want more and geekier travel gear, check the TravelGearBlog.

After surveying some harried but experienced business travelers in the seats next to, in front of and behind me, we've started a wish-list for travel technology that goes beyond free in-hotel breakfast. We want:

1. Tables and chairs in airport waiting areas (electric outlets would be a plus)
2. Brighter lights in hotel workspaces
3. Unblocked (and more) electric outlets in hotel rooms
4. Better and more reliable hotel wireless speed
5. A place to print documents in a hotel from our rooms
   
6. In-flight Internet ['nuff said]
   
7. Firewalls that don't block useful sites or prevent VPN connections

What's on your list besides an overpriced but ultra-cool laptop bag?

In terms of online flash games, Cubicle Freakout's gameplay isn't particularly compelling. But gameplay isn't really Cubicle Freakout's claim to fame. This game is really about wreaking as much havoc in your cubicle as you can as quickly as possible. The fun of it comes more from the way it's easy to sympathize with the freaky little dude in the game. The sound and visuals are also quite good when compared to other typical flash games.

You're not going to spend more than about 3 minutes with this one, but as time wasters go, sometimes a short-term commitment is all you really want anyway.

If there's one thing that users of David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) system suffer from, it's typically the temptation to mess with their system. Nothing feels better than having all of your stuff under control, except maybe having all of your stuff under control in a sexy new system.

So if you've been rocking the same GTD application for too long and feel it's time to mix things up a little, check out this amazing survey of the GTD application landscape at About This Particular Mac.

While it originates at a Mac-centric site, the list should be of interest to any GTD practitioner since many (if not most) of the listed applications are web apps, with the occasional cross-platform app thrown in.

For good measure, here are our favorite GTD apps based on platfrom:

Windows: ClearContext (an Outlook add-in)
Mac: iGTD
Web: Backpack or Remember The Milk

Now you can stay in touch with friends using Facebook for Blackberry, a standalone application. Sure Facebook can be accessed normally through the likes of mobile browsers like Opera, but this new application provides more streamlined and optimized mobile access for Facebook.

After installing the application, users can send and view messages, photos, pokes, and wall posts. They will also be able to take a picture and directly send it to their profiles complete with tags if their Berry's have cameras. Although this is good for long commutes and waiting for meals to be served, it could be encouraging a new level of unproductiveness in the workplace!

There have been reports of Facebook for Blackberry not working with older handsets and on some mobile networks.

You can download the installer from Blackberry or Facebook.

It's happened to everyone at one time or another. You buy a shiny new computer, take it home, and realize that it doesn't have Microsoft Office installed. How are you going to write your term paper, letters, or other office documents?

So you fish around in the box and find a copy of Microsoft Works. The computer maker must have thrown it in there as a freebie. And hey, it's got a word processor and spreadsheet. What more could you need?

Well, for basic office tasks, Works does fine. But if and when you decide you need a bit more oomph, you'll find that many other office suites just don't know what to do with documents created in Works. Fortunately, Microsoft has updated its free Works Converter to support Works 6-9.

Now the real problems arise when you find old Works 2.0 documents lying around on a floppy disk. Sure, you can open those documents in Excel or Word. But where are you going to find a floppy disk drive?

[via ActiveWin]

Our hands-on journey with the beta for Office 2008 continues. What about compatibility with Office 2007 for Windows? Specifically Outlook/Exchange and XML files?

Office 2004 has given our Intel Mac contingent much to complain about ; speed, interface, did we mention speed? Beyond that, compatibility problems with previous and current versions of Office for Windows -- especially in the area of Outlook PST files -- have plagued all Office for Mac users. With the introduction of the new Office Open XML file type in Office 2007 for Windows, these compatibility problems expanded to all files in the Office family.

Although "total integration with Windows Office users" has always been a promised feature -- and chief selling point -- of Office for Mac, longtime users know that compatibility is easier said than done. While pre-Office 2007 Word, Excel and Access files created in Office for Windows may be viewable or editable on the Mac, the same cannot be said for e-mail data files created in Outlook for Windows. Considering the importance of e-mail in the office, we find the lack of platform synergy both confusing and irritating.

If you are a Google Docs user you are going to be happy to know that Google Docs Mobile was recently released. Accessing your online Google Docs has gotten easier but don't get your hopes up yet, there are some restrictions.

There were some hints in September about the new mobile service when users came across a working web address for the service. Google Docs Mobile is still in its early stages and it's far from perfect. For instance, only iPhone and Blackberry devices are officially supported. And you can only view documents. You can't edit them. You can either open spreadsheets as an HTML document or you can download an XLS version.

Presentations are said to be viewable on the iPhone. Other devices may work with the mobile version, but Google has said that the more advanced a phone's browsing capability is, the more seamlessly it will work with the Mobile Docs site. As for the interface, it's basically a stripped down version of the online site offering not much more than plain text with no formatting.

A trend that has been flowing with Google has been the development of proper mobile applications, as with Gmail, and Gmail Apps for your domain. We wonder how long it will take for a Google Docs mobile application to get off the ground?

Microsoft Office 2007 may include a bunch of nifty updates from previous versions of Microsoft's office suite. But it also includes new document formats for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. In other words, it causes a bunch of headaches when an Office 2007 user sends files to Office 2003 or OpenOffice.org users.

There are a bunch of services that will convert the new .xlsx, .docx, and .pptx files to old fashioned .xls, .doc, and .ppt files. But Microsoft has a solution for anyone who just needs to read documents without editing them.

This summer Microsoft release a compatibility update allowing Office 2003 and earlier customers to open the new file formats. It turns out that update also lets you use the free Word Viewer 2003 to read .docx files. Now Microsoft has also released PowerPoint Viewer 2007 with support for .pptx files.

There's no update to Excel Viewer 2003 yet, but we're guessing it's just a matter of time.

[via ActiveWin]

Call us silly, but one of the things we've come to expect from spreadsheet applications is accurate math. But a few weeks ago a number of users started reporting that there was a bug in Microsoft Excel 2007 that caused the number 100,000 to pop up any time you entered an equation that should have equaled 65,535 or 65,536. For example, 850 x 77.1 = 100,000.

As it turns out, if you perform other functions on that cell, Excel will spit out the correct numbers. But on-screen it displays the wrong number.

Two weeks later, Microsoft has issued a fix for Excel 2007, and the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Excel Services 2007. The update will eventually be pushed to Excel 2007 users through Windows Update. But if you want to download it now, you can download the appropriate update from Microsoft.

[via Digital Inspiration]

If you are a corporate Gmail user, get ready for double the email storage capacity and some new security tools.

Google has reworked some components to their online business application suite and doubling email is hot on the list. The current business users, hundreds of thousands of them in the public and private sectors, will see their 10 GB of space jump to 25 GB. The next exciting addition is the inclusion of security features through the recent Postini acquisition. Although Gmail's spam blocker and virus tools are pretty good, Postini's addition is sure to set a new standard in web based email solutions. The new security tools will be able to insulate email from viruses and spam, as well as recover lost data, and also ensure employees are not violating company policies.

Standard Gmail users can expect their storage to hover under the 3 GB point for a while, and as for the security features, no word on whether they will be integrated. The Standard Edition of Google Apps is free, while the Premier Edition with more storage is $50 per user, per year.

While Google gets a lot of attention every time it launches a new online Office application, and Microsoft earned a few laughs with its announcement of online storage and collaboration features for MS Office, Zoho continues to out-pace the competition.

Zoho's latest accomplishment is a full-featured online database application. Zoho DB lets you create, edit, and share databases. You can organize your data as if it were a spreadsheet, but run queries like you would with a database. There's supports for queries in pretty much any SQL format.

You can create a variety of charts and reports, and you can even embed your database in a web page. If you really want to see what it Zoho DB can do, check out the promotional video after the jump.

While Microsoft is taking steps to web-ify its offline office suite, Adobe is joining the crowded field of companies offering web-based office applications. Adobe is buying Virtual Ubiquity, makers of Buzzword, a new online word processor. At the same time, the company is launching a beta of a new document sharing service cleverly titled "Share." (Don't worry that's just an internal codename. Rest assured it will probably be renamed something like "Adobe Share" by the time it's officially launched).

Buzzword was already built using Adobe's Flex environment, which means it runs inside of a web browser using the same Flash player you need to watch YouTube videos. An offline version of Buzzword is expected next year.

It's a full-featured word processor, with support for tables, images, page breaks, and pretty much anything you'd want in a word processor. Well, almost. Apparently it doesn't support hyperlinks, which is a bit baffling. Adobe plans to integrate Buzzword and Share, letting you create documents, store them online and share them with other users.