Google Announces Presentations, Renames Suite as Google Docs
September 18th, 2007
About 5 months ago, Presentations speculation began when Google announced their acquisition of Tonic. Today it was finally confirmed that Presentations will soon be available in their office suite, which is being renamed Google Docs. This sounds a lot better than the likely alternative, Google Docs & Spreadsheets & Presentations.
Presentations is designed to be Google’s web-based alternative to Microsoft Powerpoint, and allow users to organize, share, present, and even collaborate on presentations all from within their web browser. Here is a quick video on Presentations:
[youtube eRqUE6IHTEA]
(Feed Readers may need to click through to view the video)
So far, early impressions have not been positive overall. The good news is Google has a habit of releasing average products once they are usable, then releasing a drastically improved version not to long after. Hopefully Google will continue to focus their resources on the Docs suite, as all three are very usable, but need a lot of work in my opinion.











I love Google Docs and I like what they are doing but I think I’ll stick with iWork ‘08 and NeoOffice for now.
Michael – I think if you are using them privately, that is probably your best bet. Right now, these online versions are a little more focused on being social and sharing your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
I’m in a tricky situation, because I already own Microsoft Office. At this time, and probably for awhile, Google Docs will not rival Office. Office has had two decades to get where they are, and the services are well integrated. I think if I didn’t already own Office, I would spend more time trying out these alternatives, including OpenOffice, Google Docs, and such.