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Google To Add Presentations

Posted by kdawson on from the looking-office-like dept.

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."

5 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Lazy employees by Matt+Perry · · Score: 4, Informative

    Furthermore, if this cannot export to PDF or PowerPoint, it's pretty much useless. When giving presentations, Internet access is rarely provided or is flakey at best.
    I'm sure it'll export to both. I've been using Google Docs and the word processor can export to HTML, RTF, MS Word, OpenOffice Writer, and PDF. The Google spreadsheet can export to CSV, HTML, OpenOffice Calc, PDF, plain text, and MS Excel.
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  2. Re:Is it Flash or lots of JavaScript? by TodMinuit · · Score: 3, Informative
    From TonicSystems.com:

    Q. Who is Tonic Systems? What are their products?
    A: Tonic Systems is a San Francisco-based company that provides Java presentation automation products and solutions for document management - Tonic Systems Builder, Tonic Systems Filter, Tonic Systems Transformer, Tonic Systems Viewer, and JarJar Links. Features of their products included text extraction for indexing documents, presentation creation capabilities and document conversion tools.
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  3. Re:So... by Sancho · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Tonic makes a good product. by vistic · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:Lazy employees by glwtta · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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