Google Presentation Launched
Office September 18th, 2007 - By Haochi
As anticipated, Google today launched their online presentation application at TechCrunch40 (though the site has been up since last night) and changed their wacky name to Google Docs in the U.S. and Google Documents elsewhere (previously Google Docs & Spreadsheets).
The application includes most of the basic features that you can find on a desktop presentation program (PowerPoint, OO.o Impress, etc.), such as image insertion, font styling, and background/theme changing. You can also upload files in Microsoft PowerPoint’s .ppt/.pps format from your computer and edit online.
Of course, taking advantage of being an “online” application, Google Presentation allows users to share and collaborate the presentation with their friends and colleagues.
On the presentation page, you can chat with your audiences who are watching your slide show (they need to be signed into their Google Account though). You can toggle the chat window by click on the vertical bar with the little arrow on it.
If I am not mistaken, you can only save the presentation in HTML format (Google packs all the stuff: images, JavaScript and CSS files in a ZIP file), meaning that it might not work with other presentation programs.
I believe that I am not going to fully switch to Google Presentation given that it doesn’t save files in formats that are compatible with other presentation programs and there are already some (privacy) problems within the application itself.
They beat the deadline by more than 100 hours, impressive. :)
UPDATE: I was right, Google Presentation does not support saving presentations in PowerPoint/OpenOffice.org format. “Google launches presentations, but shouldn’t have“, says Googling Google.
September 18th, 2007 at 6:34 pm
I think that the single most important reason not to switch is the lack of really nice, smooth effects, such as element build-ins/outs, slide transitions, reflexions, etc.
I am playing with Sliderocket right now, which has all of these things, but it is really buggy at the moment…
September 18th, 2007 at 8:16 pm
I disagree, those fancy stuff aren’t required for a web-app like this, but yeah, it would be nice to have them though.
September 19th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
I’m sure they’ll add new features soon enough. Until then, I’m sticking with ppt and Open Office.
September 19th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
I trust that you’ll keep me up to date on this, Haochi.
October 11th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
If you simply want to save the presentation as pdf, you can go to myplick.com, give it the google presentation url, the site will then give you a slideshow that you can download as pdf. You can also do other things with it, like upload and synchronize audio with the slides, etc.