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Google presentations

Google announced back in April that it would be adding presentations to its Google Docs&Spreadsheets tool. Now the service is available, and Google has, thankfully, decided not to call it "GoogleDocs&Spreadsheets&Presentations" but has shortened the name of the suite of applications to "Google Docs." To see what it looks like, go to your Google Docs page (or open an account), click on "new" over at the left, then click on Presentations.
I am told by my testing team, a couple of teenage girls, that Presentations does not (yet?) offer anything like the features provided by Microsoft Powerpoint. However, the main advantage of Presentations is that it is online, allowing one to collaborate easily when developing a presentation. (This is also a feature of Docs and Spreadsheets, of course.)
To learn more, you can visit YouTube to see and hear a video called Google Docs in plain English.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on October 11, 2007
Categories: Communication, Conferences | | Comments (2)

Comments

Do people actually want to collaborate on a presentation in this way? I really can't see it being successful; if you're giving the talk you want to prepare the material (of course, I'm looking at this from a scientist PoV: things are different in industry).

I might be useful if you want to work on the presentation yourself from different locales, but even so, a USB pen is more convenient.

Have your teenage testers tried Keynote yet? It's very, very swish.

Posted by: Richard P. Grant | October 12, 2007 12:06 AM

Thanks, Richard -- unfortunately (?), my teenage testers have to use MS Powerpoint for compatibility with their school, and they use PCs, not Macs, at home. They are very happy with PPT, though, especially the younger one (not quite a teenager, actually) who has Office 2007, having the newest computer at home.
It will be interesting to see if others comment -- if you are giving a presentation for a group, I wonder if it would be useful to collaborate directly on the slides? The Google calendar function is as far as I have personally got on online small-group collaboration/coordination: I would be interested to know of scientists who find the online GDS&P approach useful in a way that other systems (eg Microsoft) aren't.

Posted by: Maxine | October 12, 2007 09:37 AM

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