Presentation Tools
Over the past couple of years Google has been working hard to chip away at the empire of Microsoft, particularly by creating online alternatives to Microsoft Word. Googledocs, and Googlespreadsheets offer good alternatives to Microsoft, with several advantages: primarily cost (Google is free), but also you can edit your files from any computer, and have the ability to share them with others.
Google has now created an alternative to my least favorite Microsoft Tool-Powerpoint. With Google Presentation. If you already have already been using GoogleDocs, you can access Presentation easily. In fact Presentation seems to be just part of docs. When in Google Docs you select New and (instead of Spreadsheet or Document) select Presentation. It’s that simple (as with most things Google). The interface for creating a slideshow works and looks a lot like Powerpoint (this is both a good and a bad thing, good in so much as it makes the transition easy, bad as in Powerpoint has serious problems). While some of the features are limited, Google Presentations has some serious advantages already over PowerPoint, namely the ability to share your slides easily with others, without emailing the files around or using Slideshare.
And, here is the killer feature for academics, it integrates with Google Talk, which means as long as others have a Google account everyone can log in an follow along with the presentation.
If you want to know more read this post from Bryn Mawr college, and check out the sample presentation.
You can also read more about it at the Google Blog complete with a how-to.
Warning, this doesn’t work with Safari or other Webkit Browsers, so you will need Firefox.
September 19th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
What “serious problems” would these be? For basic stuff, PowerPoint’s interface is pretty simple and straightforward. And most other presentation apps — OpenOffice Impress, Keynote, etc. — have a very similar interface, so if PowerPoint has serious problems, then they have serious problems, too.
September 19th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
For a brief explanation of its serious flaws you can see this Wikipedia article or you can see this more elaborate presentation on the rhetoric of powerpoint. I would group Open Office and PowerPoint together, but separate out Keynote. What this boils down to is that PowerPoint guides you (thru the default structures) to use bullet points, list of three’s etc., which actually yield a bad presentation, the idea that text should be displayed. Rather Keynote is structured as “image design” for slides. I’m not being a fanboy here for Mac, often I just make my own simple slides from another program. But the default structure of many Microsoft Office tools (PowerPoint is just the worst) tends towards assuming the user is an idiot, and towards business uses, which are not always the most effective for academic modes.
September 21st, 2007 at 4:37 pm
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