Web Worker Daily

In a move that probably surprised very few web workers, Google has added presentations to Google Docs. If you’re a hardcore user of PowerPoint or Keynote, you likely won’t be rushing right out to change your workflow from desktop to web. The question is whether Google Presentations is good enough to handle the basic presentation needs of the average web worker.

If you’ve used any of the major desktop presentation applications, you’ll be right at home in the design interface here. The metaphor is simple and familiar: a set of slides that fill a column at the left hand side of your browser window and an area at the right hand side that lets you work on a single slide at a time. You get objects on the slide that you click to interact with: text and images. Slides come in a few simple, standard layouts. The presentation as a whole can be styled with a theme, from a limited set provided by Google; I don’t see any way to create your own themes, though if you import an existing PowerPoint presentation it picks up the theme background image.

As with the other Google Docs applications, multiple users can work collaboratively on a presentation, and Google handles the details of locking and saving. You get the same share, publish, and e-mail integration that you’ve grown to expect from other parts of the Google Docs framework. One thing that’s new for presentations is the “Start Presentation” link. This opens your presentation in a separate browser window, with a URL of its own that you can share with other users. When they navigate to that URL, they’re watching a copy of the presentation synchronized with yours, and have a Google Chat session running as a sidebar.

You can import existing PowerPoint presentations; I tested this on a few presentations I had hanging around, and it did fine with simple text and graphics. Things like blends and animations seem to simply get ignored on import. Keynote users are out of luck unless they take the additional step of exporting to PowerPoint first.

Taken on its own terms - as a simple way to create web-based presentations showing static slides - Google Presentations works quickly and easily, with painless collaborative features. Where you’ll run into issue are the places where you’ve used any more advanced functionality from other packages. Thinking back over the last couple of presentations I’ve done, for example, the most recent one required me to save the individual slides as .jpg images due to the way the conference was organized - a trivial task in either Keynote or PowerPoint, but one that would have required a long session of screenshots with Google Presentations. In the one before that, I used a fairly complex diagram that I brought on screen in a series of animations. If you’re doing more than a simple sales deck or meeting agenda, I suspect you’ll bump up against the limitations here sooner rather than later.