Google Presentations: A Useful Tool that Needs a Little Work

Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets have already been utilized by many people around the world. A new addition to the online office suite provided by the search engine has been made available to Internet users who have a Google account.. The new online software called Google Presentations is designed to compete with Microsoft's PowerPoint and OpenOffice's Presentation software. The online nature of Google Presentations makes it easier for groups to collaborate, but falls short of the functionality that the desktop applications give.

While Google Presentations may be a little limited, that fact that Google Presentations like its predecessors can save files in the more popular file formats such as Microsoft's PowerPoint, OpenOffice's Presentation format or Corel's Slide Show format makes it easier to have the files saved to a central point and transfer them back and forth between groups of users, regardless of which application they use to make their presentatns. Google Presentations lacks some of the nicer features of Power Point such as slide transitions and animations as well as support for VB script, but as the service is intended to allow people to collaborate on presentations over long distances, it should not be judged harshly on this lack.

The search engine launched its new software as a service application, Google Presentations on September 17^th. The integration of Google talk into the software itself is a useful tool if more than one person is presenting a slide show presentation, a microphone hooked up to a computer using both the VoIP software and Google's presentation allows more than one user to do the voice overs.

Since software as a service is a relatively new twist on existing technologies, it may be a while before Google Presentations has the full functionality of its desktop successors and predecessors. For people who do not want to spend a lot of money or an office suite package or take the time to download Sun's OpenOffice package, Google Presentations is a chap, in fact free, way of using simple software for practical applications. Google Presentations also lets the user display the presentations created using the online software a way of displaying the links via a url, making it possible for the presentation to be viewed on any computer with access to the Internet. Now if they can just make a Google application that has a better grammar checker than the one currently available in Microsoft Word.

Sources:

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9780287-7.html

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/our-feature-presentation.html