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Google To Add Presentations
A number of readers (some from the audience at Web 2.0 Expo) wrote to let us know that Google is adding presentations to their Docs and Spreadsheets package. With the announcement the company revealed that they have purchased Tonic Systems to help with the new presentation software. It's expected to be ready by summer. Google's CEO Eric Schmidt was asked if Docs and Spreadsheets will compete with MS Office, and he said, "We don't think so. It doesn't have all the functionality, nor is it intended to have the functionality of products like Microsoft Office."
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Where does the information that it can't export to PDF or PowerPoint format come from? I can't find that in TFA. Google Documents and Spreadsheets can certainly export to MS Office, OpenDocument, PDF and other formats, so it would certainly surprise me if this couldn't too.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
Depends.
If you want to start offering a product or service, and it's going to cost you more to develop that product/service than to buy a company which already offers it, the choice is obvious.
I use the TonicPoint Viewer for Mac instead of OpenOffice or Powerpoint... it has way fewer troubles with fonts. If I open a Windows PowerPoint presentation in Mac PowerPoint, I usually end up seeing weird characters instead of bullets in lists... and equations with greek letters, etc. are almost always messed up.
So at least now I believe Google Presently will be a decent product.
PDF doesn't always cut it as one often uses animations.
Sadly, and disturbingly, PDF files can do animations.
When I moderate, I only use "-1, Overrated". That way, I never get meta-moderated!
Check their web-site...
w ww.tonicsystems.com/
http://www.tonicsystems.com/ won't give you much but the web archive does:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060820002948/http://
PDF seems one of the things they do.
That's a lot easier said than done.
I don't know if you've actually USED Docs but the last time I did--about 2-3 weeks ago--it didn't even have find & replace capability. All it had was "replace all" and even that had "experimental" warnings all over it and couldn't be undone.
So saying "All they need is a good API and a mechanism for plugins" when they can't even do find & replace is just a little silly, in my opinion.
Maybe. In about 2 years. At the earliest.
A lot of Google's products were previous companies: Google Docs: Writley Google Earth: Keyhole Picasa: Picasa Google Sketch up: Sketch Up I'm sure I've missed some but I'm sure you get it.
Furthermore, if this cannot export to PDF or PowerPoint, it's pretty much useless.
Yeah, and if it doesn't let you type the letter "e", that will be bad too. Also, it shouldn't give you cancer - I think it would be bad if it gave you cancer.
sic transit gloria mundi
How about buying DabbleDB (www.dabbledb.com)?
Desktoptwo seems to be using a VNC applet to render Acrobat and OpenOffice application GUIs, so no "web-based Java version of OpenOffice", just horribly compressed visuals in a laggy VNC window to a machine running OO.
I've just been spending the last week moving all my documents to Google Docs and I think it's great.
I want to keep my docs forever
I moved everything over simply because my docs are spread across multiple machines some of which are ancient. I suddenly found myself wanting an ancient document that was stored on a laptop that didn't have any Internet connection. Luckily it still worked but it was a game getting the docs to a more modern PC. With Google docs I won't care what media the docs stored on, nor what computer or OS.
Backups
Sure I can all hear you smugly saying just get it off your backups but in those days I'd probably of used a plate sized floppy disk and would now be wondering where I insert the thing into a modern PC. Now I don't have to care about backups as they do it for me.
Accessibility
I can access all my files from any computer, any OS, anywhere in the world (as long as I have some form of Internet connection).
Sharing
I can keep my docs private or give access to specific people. I can also make them public if there is anyone out there sorry enough to read my ramblings.
Collaborate
I can work with others on the same documents.
Permanence
OK Google might not be here for ever but I bet they'll be here longer than MS and certainly longer than any of my PC's will last.
Features
I'm one of those users who probably only uses 80% of the features in Word so a reduced feature set doesn't matter to me. The formatting features are roughly the same as those offered by web based email systems.
Is it perfect
No - it can be a bit clunky in places and it seems to prefer shorter documents to larger ones. I figure it will probably get better over time and I was happy to switch with just the benefits as they stand at the moment. Oh, did I mention it was free?