Google Docs now has Powerpoint like features – or at least the beginnings of it …
Earlier this year, Google purchased a small company that developed presentation software – in other words ‘Powerpoint on the Web’ – we’ll now it’s here. Google Docs has been extended from documents and spreadsheets to presentations as well.
If you login to your ‘Google Docs’ account or create a free one you’ll find some new options available. The ‘New’ menu now has a ‘Presentation’ option to create a presentation from scratch.
An existing .ppt or .pps file can be uploaded to Google Docs for editing online. As with other parts of Google Docs there’s no support for Microsoft’s Office 2007 formats (.pptx etc) but surprisingly there’s no support for the OpenDocument presentation format (Google Docs supports documents and spreadsheets in OpenDocument format).
Our informal tests were no great surprise. Simple Powerpoint presentations uploaded with no trouble but larger and more complex presentations didn’t display in Google Docs in the way you’d like.
The web page to make or edit a presentation is straight-forward. Anyone who has used some presentation software will be able to easily grasp the basic set of functions available.
Making a simple presentation only takes a few minutes, even for someone using the new Google feature for the first time.
Of course, it’s nowhere near as powerful as Powerpoint, Keynote or any other presentation software. For example the font and themes are limited, there’s no animation, video, outline or note support.
But the upside, as with other parts of Google Docs, is the ability for many people to collaborate on a presentation at the same time from anywhere. There’s no need to pay for or install special software – even something that Microsoft Powerpoint can’t properly match the simple and elegant document sharing supplied by Google.
Changes made by anyone, including yourself, are listed under the ‘Revisions’ tab. Tracking changes is always on in Google Docs, unlike MS Office where you have to turn it on.
Presentations you make online can NOT be saved to .ppt – standard Powerpoint format. The ‘Save As Zip’ option will save a web page version of the presentation to your computer, but there is no ‘
Save As’ that retains the full fidelity of the original presentation. This is a major limitation of Google Presentations.
For MS Office users
Unlike the document and spreadsheet parts of Google Docs, the new presentations feature has limited use for Powerpoint users.
We’ve suggested in the past that you can use Google Docs to work with a group of people on the substance of a document, then download it to MS Word for final editing see here and here. Sadly that’s not (yet?) available for presentations. You can collaborate on a presentation with others online but can’t save the complete results to something that Powerpoint can understand.
Google will probably fix that omission, most likely with a ‘Save to .odp’ the OpenDocument presentation format. Hopefully by then, we’ll have a decent set of tools to let MS Office work with OpenDocument formats see https://office-watch.com/?28
