Google Presentations beta steals wind from Powerpoint sails

By Stan Beer
Tuesday, 18 September 2007 20:21

Home IT

As Google continues to deny that it is building a stable of online Microsoft Office competitors, the rhetoric continues to sound increasingly hollow with the launch of an online tool obviously designed to steal some of the wind from Microsoft's Powerpoint sails.

Called Google Presentations, the new addition to the Google Docs family has been released and, at this stage, it is very much a simple version of PowerPoint although it does not have import-export compatibility.

However, like the other members of the stable, Writely and Spreadsheet, Google Presentations is easy to use to build basic documents and it has it all over Microsoft's desktop product for collaborative efforts.

Once again like its stable mates, performance is comparable to its desktop equivalent but the functionality still falls quite a way short of the full-blown PowerPoint product. Then again, unless you're a power user, how much functionality do need? Perhaps children doing school projects may be able to provide the answer.

Google Presentations beta is available to anyone with a Google Docs account.