Google’s Presentation is “Suite”
ByGoogle completes its free suite of office products this week with the launch of Presentation –a product that competes with Microsoft’s popular PowerPoint software.
With this addition, Google Docs now offers, for free, a complete suite of office productivity products. All the software is web-based, nothing is downloaded to the user’s computer. As long as the user is on-line, Google products work fine.
I had to try it out. I created a new presentation, played around with the different themes, inserted different types of slides (title, bullet list, two column, etc.). A few shortcomings were that it didn’t have an option to insert a chart slide or a spreadsheet. It’s definitely a simpler product — not as many bells, whistles and options as PowerPoint, but that could be a plus for the novice user.
Presentation also allows the uploading and revision of .ppt files, so I uploaded a graphic-rich presentation and noticed quite a few slides that didn’t make the translation very well. If you have a mostly-text file, it should upload with few problems.
The feature especially touted by Google is the collaboration ability of having storage of documents on-line. If you are collaborating on a document with several people, it does alleviate the confusion of multiple versions of the same document out there. The document owner uploads the file and specifies who can access and make revisions. Google has a blog entry that announces Presentation along with a informative (and cute) video. See it here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/.
