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Google Docs to support Powerpoint

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the more-executive-time-wasters dept.

KindredHyperion writes "Garett Rogers at ZDNet has an article on the prospect of a Powerpoint-esque addition to Google Docs and Spreadsheets. From the article: "If you dig around the language files in Google Docs, you will find what appears to be traces of a new service preparing for launch soon. Meet Google Presently — an online presentation creator that will likely read and write the most common formats like Microsoft PowerPoint and Open Office Impress.""

6 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. What about opera users? by FST · · Score: 5, Informative
    From source:

    var MSG_UNSUPPORTED_BROWSER="Unsupported Browser Presently doesn't support Opera and will not function properly. Would you like to continue anyway?";

    Looks like Google is leaving us Opera users out. How long do you think we will need to wait before they begin supporting it?
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  2. Re:Damn..! by Ankur+Dave · · Score: 2, Informative

    There was an alternative all along: S5. It stores presentations in XHTML+CSS and uses Javascript to advance to the next slide. It's friendly even for browsers that don't support Javascript or CSS---it falls back to plain text rather nicely.

  3. good reflexes by Meltir · · Score: 3, Informative

    Amazingly, the website/lang template from tfa (http://docs.google.com/Localizer?f=AllMsgs.hdf), does not contain said entries anymore.
    Try searching it for 'presentation' or anything noted in tfa.
    Dunno if it they were removed, or simply never there.

    Have fun speculating thou.
    Maybe it was just something they wanted to do.
    This may not be traces of any future magic, it maybe something writely was up to before they were bought out by google.

    Yet anotheir ghost feature which someone says they found traces of a while back but noone can confirm today.

    That said, it would be cool to have anotheir alternative to ppoint and impress.
    But i doubt that showing presentations on conferences, at school or work will based solely on this service.
    Other then availability, the same privacy issues as with Gspreadsheets and Gdocs apply.

  4. Re:Damn..! by UtucXul · · Score: 4, Informative

    There was an alternative all along: S5. It stores presentations in XHTML+CSS and uses Javascript to advance to the next slide. It's friendly even for browsers that don't support Javascript or CSS---it falls back to plain text rather nicely.
    I was really excited when I first learned out S5. I did my thesis proposal using it. But I have to say that after that experience, it really wasn't worth it for me. I had to use latex2html for equations which was fine. But to get figures in it to look properly required enough tweaking that the result works poorly on computers with a different screen resolution than I started with. Maybe I could have handled the CSS more carefully and got something more portable, but that would have been even more of a pain than what I did. And I had a directory full of files. Not to mention how poorly embedding animations works.

    Now I use LaTeX Beamer and could not be happier. Maybe S5 would be great for talks that have few or no figures or equations and just bullet points, but that is not enough to help me. With Beamer I get a single pdf with everything and it looks the same regardless of what computer/OS I show it on. All done using nothing more than the free software I normally use.

    It's too bad since I really think S5 is a cool idea.
  5. Re:visio would be VERY useful by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 2, Informative

    visio has no decent OSS version and none that will read its format. It would be useful if Google created even a web app of it and perhaps release a library for reading/writing the format.

    On OS X, Omnigraffle by the Omnigroup seems to win a lot of Visio users over. It can import and export to the Visio XML format and in fact stores info natively in XML. I know one engineering manager who switched to OS X after trying it out on one of his engineer's machines and realizing how much better it was for certain tasks, than Visio. It is not an OSS application or free, but it is another option.

  6. Re:Damn..! by c_sd_m · · Score: 2, Informative

    Now I use LaTeX Beamer and could not be happier. Maybe S5 would be great for talks that have few or no figures or equations and just bullet points, but that is not enough to help me. With Beamer I get a single pdf with everything and it looks the same regardless of what computer/OS I show it on. All done using nothing more than the free software I normally use.
    While I do use Beamer (and think it's great) it's not necessarily the greatest solution for talks with many figures. It's great with equations but having to define a grid and explicitly place figures (e.g., to have a column of text on half of the slide with an image next to it) is a pain most of the time. Unless you're comfortable with Pstricks, of course. For anyone familiar with Latex it's well worth learning. Nearly any functionality that you can use in Latex can be used with Beamer. If you're presenting report that you've already written it's really nice to just cut, paste, parse, and edit it down.