Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Google's Powerpoint

Hi All

I think a lot of people were waiting for this one. Google finally launched their online presentations app, analog to powerpoint. It's called Google Docs presentations.

Here , in the discussion groups for google's docs app, it's said that it was launched today (18/september/2007). It found by chance, I had read about it, and then i went to my google's docs account and tried new, and then, ula la, "new presentation" was already there. Well, let's to the application.

After choosing new->presentation, the follow screen appears:














It shows at the left side the slides and a default page cover for the presentation. Clicking the "change theme" link takes you to the following screen, that enables you to use one of the 15 ready to use models.



After choosing the "Rustic" theme:



According to this post it was suppose to call google presently. Thanks God it was changed to Google Docs presentations feature : ) much better indeed.

Continuing, the controls are quite straightforward, as it is the other web apps of google docs.
The most interesting thing of google's presentations feature is that it enables collaborative editing and presentation. In the following screen is an example of a presentation together with chat:



One feature that is a bit annoying is when you double click on a slide it starts in full mode the presentation.

You can click here to view the final presentation published on-line.

I could see some bugs, as the font size not sticking during editing. Font size 20 wouldn't work. Just tried to reproduce this bug and now it was working. Probably some instability : )

  • Copy/Paste: Control+c and Control+v works well, like copying things from one slide to the other.
  • Graphics: as you could imagine that's another point that stays behind, which we could expect, it doesn't have all the functionalities available in the windows powerpoint. But I think that adding vector graphics, as lines, squares, circles, would not be that hard.
  • Image library: One thing that they missed (but they will get there with the time probably) is a ready to use library of images. Any image needs to be saved on the computers before hand to be able to insert in the presentation.
  • Revisions: As with the other web doc apps, it saves all the revisions, enabling to identify who changed each time.
  • Printing: It's got a printable view (available from the file menu), but the only format is two slides per page. It would be nice to print 6 per page also, or a full page per slide.
  • Export: The only way to export the file is as a zip file. Meaning that, (at the moment), it's not possible to import or present it using powerpoint. Really a shame.
  • Importing: it works really well. To import a power point slide, just use "file->upload a file (.PPT, etc)". The imported graphics also are transformed from vector in raster, which means you can't edit an arrow made in power point. Also tables are not available. Those in powerpoint will be imported as a bitmap line. The translation to portuguese of the menu item is a bit strange, it's like "Send a File" instead of "Import a file".
  • Master slide: There is no way to edit the master slides. At least i couldn't find it : ) When you create a new slide from a ppt imported from powerpoint, some things of the master are preserved in the online version. But not all...
  • Notes: Another easy feature that is missing is the notes. One can't add notes to the slide


A search tool for images would be really cool.

Something that would be a plus at some point would be including animations on the presentation. Something else missing in this area is multimedia. In the help they say:

"Can I add multimedia effects to my presentation?
At this time, it isn't possible to add multimedia effects to your presentation"

There are also a couple of limitations in terms of size of the presentations:
  • You can upload presentations up to 10MB in size in both .ppt and .pps file formats
  • Each user has a combined limit of 5000 documents and presentations and 5000 images
Google had been developing their on-line presentation software for a while, and more recently, in april they bought a company called Tonic Systems, a company specialized in Java solutions for PowerPoint. It seems google is on a trend to buy companies to leverage their own products. Maybe we can see a much better application coming, as Tonic System has a lot more functionality available, as vector graphics and such. See here to see more.

All in all guys, it's a big step ahead, which I think a lot of people were waiting for.

Sample Presentation:
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dhhw9dn_12czn66n&fs=true

This post in portuguese:
http://emersonemuk.blogspot.com/2007/09/o-powerpoint-do-google-criando.html

Added later:

Aparently some browsers are not compatible with google's presentation feature. Here is the message you get if you try to use one of them. I like the Intergalactical message :P

Sorry, but this browser does not support web presentations.

We recommend you try Google Docs on: All of these are FREE and easy to download and use.

If you are working to fix problems with a specific browser and would like to bypass this check, just add ?browserok=true to the end of the Google Docs URL.

Please note that it is a violation of intergalactic law to use this parameter under false pretences, so don't let us catch you at it.

And, it won't work very well -- really.
Posted by Emerson at 10:02 AM
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