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Online applications work very much like online email services such as Google mail, Hotmail and Yahoo mail.
Once you have signed up and chosen a username and password, you can access the website using a web browser on any computer connected to the internet. You will be presented with a list of your documents, with options to create a new document or edit an existing one.
There are hundreds of online applications, covering just about every type of computing task from photo editing to project management and gaming, but to start with we’ll focus on one of the most useful types: online office tools.
Almost every computer user needs to write a letter or create a small spreadsheet at some point, so these tools are useful for just about everyone-especially those who don’t enough office work to justify spending money on software.
Some of the sites we will look at include several functions, such as a word processor and a spreadsheet, while others focus on just one. A good example of a specialist site is buzzword, which is dedicated to word processing, while a Google doc includes several tools for different purposes.
Anyone who needs to write a letter or edit a document should take a look at Buzzword (www.buzzworld.com), which is owned by software company Adobe.
Buzzword is unusual among online applications in that it looks very little like a normal word processor application such as Microsoft word. Instead, it has been given a very slick-looking interface and relies heavily on the use of six separate toolbars, only one of which is fully displayed at any time. the toolbars are linked to the editing task in hand, be it concerned with fonts, paragraphs, lists, images, tables or comments.