Google does PowerPoint
Well, it’s not called PowerPoint, and it lacks quite a few of the power features you get from Microsoft’s market leading desktop presentation software. But, as Dwight Silverman at the Chron points out, Google’s newest “doc” application solves a couple of big problems for the millions of people who aren’t PowerPoint users:
App by app, Google has been building an impressive online office suite with word processing and spreadsheets. Now the search giant has added a presentation manager, which is slick and solves two common problems — sharing presentations when the recipient doesn’t have PowerPoint, and needing to give a presentation to an audience on a computer that lacks software.
Presentations at Google Docs lets you both build presentations in your Web browser, as well as upload ones you’ve built in Microsoft’s PowerPoint. That makes presenting on any machine a snap — you just have to hope that, if it doesn’t have PowerPoint, it can at least get to the Internet
Silverman doesn’t dwell on it, but perhaps the biggest selling point for Google’s Office products is the ability to collaborate on documents in real time and track changes with easy-t0-use versioning. Microsoft’s excellent Office 2007 product also offers these capabilities, but it doesn’t come cheap and it’s not near as easy to set up.
Oh, yeah. Google’s product is free.