Google Docs to support Powerpoint

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.""

Comments

What about opera users?

[FST]

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?

Re:What about opera users?

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> How long do you think we will need to wait before they begin supporting it?

W.A.G. of the day: The more mobile devices browse, the more mainstream Opera will become.

Re:What about opera users?

[DJCacophony]

How long do you think we will need to wait before they begin supporting it?

Probably until it either gains majority market share or opens up it's source.

Re:What about opera users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a bad guess. One of the latest areas where Embedded Opera is actually getting used is on the Nintendo Wii and DS. It's mostly been used for accessing Flash games like those at Wiicade, but some Javascript applications that take advantage of the Wiimote have already started showing up.

It's an odd thought, but some people seem to like being able to access the Internet on their TV while sitting on the couch. It seems to be a convenience thing.

That being said, if Google supported Opera, they could advertise the Wii as a portable viewer for their Powerpoint-ish presentations. No need for a laptop TV card, just hook up the Wii and go. Hmm. My boss with a Wii. Scary thought.

Re:What about opera users?

[siwelwerd]

They say the same thing with Google Calendar, even though you can ignore it and it runs fine in Opera.

Re:What about opera users?

[jorgevillalobos]

Probably until it either gains majority market share or opens up it's source.

That has nothing to do with it. If Google is excluding Opera users from one of their services, it's probably for one of the following reasons:

• Opera hasn't implemented (or has bugs in) certain Javascript functions required by their service. This just means that Opera needs to expand (fix) its implementation.
• There's some general policy in Google to support certain browsers and exclude all others to "play it safe". This is something that I've seen in a lot of corporate web software. The browser may very well support the app but there's a compatibility check the browser doesn't pass. The solution to this is changing the user-agent string, which I believe Opera can do easily.
• Google is using non-standard features of IE and Firefox to implement their services. In this case your point about market share is correct since Google can't spend too much time to please a relatively small group of users.

Being open source has absolutely nothing to do with this.

Re:What about opera users?

[rubycodez]

with 0.5% of browsers out there being Opera, I'd say your wait will be long indeed. No need for any company to even take the time to test with it.

Re:What about opera users?

[uhlume]

You've clearly never coded^H^H^H^H^Hattempted to code hardcore DOM-level Javascript in Opera. Opera got a number of things right. Their Javascript engine was not one of them.

Damn..!

[zyl0x]

Figures, Google finally comes up with an alternative to opening PPTs in IE (*gag*) just after I graduate from college. No one uses PPTs over the internet in real life! ;)

Re:Damn..!

[Ankur Dave]

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.

Re:Damn..!

[UtucXul]

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.

Re:Damn..!

[cp.tar]

At least I'll be able to open all the annoying .ppts I get in the mail without having to run OO.o on some ancient computer...

Re:Damn..!

[c_sd_m]

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.

No!!

[CptPicard]

I thought Google was supposed to "do no evil"... why inflict more presentations on mankind? Remember, Powerpoint corrupts absolutely...

word, excel

[seasunset]

I don't mean to troll but they could try to spend some effort in better support word and excel. The majority of documents that I share work flawlessly in OpenOffice on Linux, but the majority doesn't work at all on Google. It would be a fantastic platform for migration from Office on shared environments, if it worked...

I know, probably some problems are AJAX structural limitations, but, even so, Google could, and should, do better.

don't encourage powerpoints...

[Lord_Slepnir]

And here I was thinking that the lack of support for powerpoints was a feature of google documents. If I have to sit through one more badly-animated snooze fest of some obscure corporate policy, I'm just going to bring my DS into work. And, since the last one I had to sit through was "Appropriate use of company resources during work hours"..... well take a guess as to how effective they were.

Predictable postings

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

A slew of postings are expected where /.tters would avow that they will never store their personal data files in google's server and predict that corporations cant afford to send their data to such third party services and so this is unlikely to unseat Microsoft.

Again many would point out that once Google irons out the kinks using these millions of users as beta testers using spotty and intermittent internet connections to do document creation, they can sell out a Office-in-a-box appliance to corporations. Completely managed by IT, with better intranet speeds these machines can chew big chunks of market out of MS.

Meanwhile, unmindful of all the implications of security, invasion of privacy and other such trivial concerns, millions of users will use whatever works for them and leave the future to evolve at its own speed and pace.

Re:Predictable postings

[kevin_conaway]

Don't forget about the asshole who thinks he knows everything and just has to tell everyone so.

Going too far?

[TinBromide]

Google is going through all this work to make an online suite comparable to microsoft's ajax. Why can't people be happy with open office? I'm sure there's a way to run it off of a thumb drive on any system that one would reasonably want to work at. (who needs to review documents on a kiosk?)

In fact, with the frailties of public wireless internet, keeping a persistent session would probably be more of a hurdle than downloading and installing open office. Its tough enough to submit a paper when comcast decides i don't need internet for 3 hours (as happened yesterday), at least i could WORK on the paper when stranded from the net.

Re:Going too far?

[ElleyKitten]

A lot of people do have access to the internet almost all the time. I have internet at home, at work, and at my night classes. What I don't have is access to the same computer all day. With Google, I can make a document (or edit my calendar) and work on it where ever I am without worrying about carrying around thumb drives and forgetting them at home or running out of space, and I can even use a library or a friend's computer without having to make sure my preferred office suite is running on it. So Google works for me. It sounds like it doesn't work for you, which is fine, because I don't think offline office suites are dying anytime soon.

No! Please!

[Bullfish]

This will just lead to even more of those insufferable powerpoints being mailed around. You know, the ones with someone's favourite tune and pictures of kittens, puppies, babies etc...

Re:No! Please!

[flyingfsck]

Hmm, actually those are the good ones - much better than corporate snoozers.

Re:Powerpoint makes you dumb

[RipTides9x]

I am having quite a bit of trouble grasping what you are trying to say.
How about a putting together a little presentation for the rest of us, which shouldn't take up too much of your weekend time, say for Monday morning, 9AM?

Re:Is there anything Google doesn't do?

[the_womble]

Google has done very little that will lock people into using them.

Its not being big and having lots of users that is the problem. It is being able to reduce consumer choice that is the problem.

visio would be VERY useful

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:visio would be VERY useful

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.

Re:visio would be VERY useful

[Anthracks]

The closest I've found is Dia, but frankly it's not ready for non-techie users yet. It suffers from GIMP syndrome, where each palette of widgets is its own window in the taskbar, commands have non-standard names for no good reason, etc. We're on a tight IT budget so I tried to win over the couple of users who were asking for Visio, but Dia wasn't up to it and we had to bite the bullet and buy some Visio licenses. If someone turned a couple of UI and process engineers loose on Dia for a while it'd probably be a great niche product.

good reflexes

[Meltir]

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.

MS Project would be better

[uwbbjai]

Having an online project management tool would be way more useful than being able to do presentations or editing spreadsheets online.

If you work for any company, chances are Word, Excel, Powerpoint would be loaded onto your machine as standard installation. But does everyone get Project as well? unlikely unless you're management.

With Google Project, at least anyone interested can look at those .mpp files and see how much they've been allocated and their deadlines, be it devs, QA, tech writers...

The AdSense Pairings Could Be Hilarious

[George Johnston]

User Dick Harding asks, "Why do all my presentations have Viagra ads on them?"