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Google Docs to support Powerpoint

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wed Feb 07, 2007 09:13 AM
from the more-executive-time-wasters dept.
Businesses Google The Internet
KindredHyperion writes "Garett Rogers at ZDNet has an article on the prospect of a Powerpoint-esque addition to Google Docs and Spreadsheets. From the article: "If you dig around the language files in Google Docs, you will find what appears to be traces of a new service preparing for launch soon. Meet Google Presently — an online presentation creator that will likely read and write the most common formats like Microsoft PowerPoint and Open Office Impress.""
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  • What about opera users? (Score:5, Informative)

    by FST (766202) on Wednesday February 07 2007, @09:17AM (#17920228) Journal
    From source:

    var MSG_UNSUPPORTED_BROWSER="Unsupported Browser Presently doesn't support Opera and will not function properly. Would you like to continue anyway?";


    Looks like Google is leaving us Opera users out. How long do you think we will need to wait before they begin supporting it?

    • Re:What about opera users? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anne_Nonymous (313852) on Wednesday February 07 2007, @09:30AM (#17920378) Homepage Journal
      >> How long do you think we will need to wait before they begin supporting it?

      W.A.G. of the day: The more mobile devices browse, the more mainstream Opera will become.

      • Re:What about opera users? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 07 2007, @10:13AM (#17920890)
        Not a bad guess. One of the latest areas where Embedded Opera is actually getting used is on the Nintendo Wii and DS [opera.com]. It's mostly been used for accessing Flash games like those at Wiicade [wiicade.com], but some Javascript applications that take advantage of the Wiimote have already started showing up [digg.com].

        It's an odd thought, but some people seem to like being able to access the Internet on their TV while sitting on the couch. It seems to be a convenience thing.

        That being said, if Google supported Opera, they could advertise the Wii as a portable viewer for their Powerpoint-ish presentations. No need for a laptop TV card, just hook up the Wii and go. Hmm. My boss with a Wii. Scary thought.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DJCacophony (832334)
      How long do you think we will need to wait before they begin supporting it?

      Probably until it either gains majority market share or opens up it's source.

      • Probably until it [...] opens up it's source.

        What does source code have to do with anything? It's not like you have to target twelve different browsers when you develop. All you need to do is follow the DOM specs, then test on each browser to ensure that there are no quirks that need to be ironed out. It's not that hard.

        In fact, it's a heck of a lot easier to support Firefox, Opera, Safari, and KHTML simultaneously than it is to support IE and Firefox. Why? Because the Microsoft programmers tell us how won

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by uhlume (597871)
          You've clearly never coded^H^H^H^H^Hattempted to code hardcore DOM-level Javascript in Opera. Opera got a number of things right. Their Javascript engine was not one of them.

      • Re:What about opera users? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jorgevillalobos (1044924) on Wednesday February 07 2007, @11:41AM (#17922130) Homepage

        Probably until it either gains majority market share or opens up it's source.

        That has nothing to do with it. If Google is excluding Opera users from one of their services, it's probably for one of the following reasons:

        • Opera hasn't implemented (or has bugs in) certain Javascript functions required by their service. This just means that Opera needs to expand (fix) its implementation.
        • There's some general policy in Google to support certain browsers and exclude all others to "play it safe". This is something that I've seen in a lot of corporate web software. The browser may very well support the app but there's a compatibility check the browser doesn't pass. The solution to this is changing the user-agent string, which I believe Opera can do easily.
        • Google is using non-standard features of IE and Firefox to implement their services. In this case your point about market share is correct since Google can't spend too much time to please a relatively small group of users.

        Being open source has absolutely nothing to do with this.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by siwelwerd (869956)
      They say the same thing with Google Calendar, even though you can ignore it and it runs fine in Opera.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rubycodez (864176)
      with 0.5% of browsers out there being Opera, I'd say your wait will be long indeed. No need for any company to even take the time to test with it.

  • Damn..! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by zyl0x (987342) on Wednesday February 07 2007, @09:18AM (#17920246)
    Figures, Google finally comes up with an alternative to opening PPTs in IE (*gag*) just after I graduate from college. No one uses PPTs over the internet in real life! ;)

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Ankur Dave (929048)
      There was an alternative all along: S5 [meyerweb.com]. It stores presentations in XHTML+CSS and uses Javascript to advance to the next slide. It's friendly even for browsers that don't support Javascript or CSS---it falls back to plain text rather nicely.

      • Re:Damn..! (Score:5, Informative)

        by UtucXul (658400) on Wednesday February 07 2007, @10:05AM (#17920758) Homepage

        There was an alternative all along: S5. It stores presentations in XHTML+CSS and uses Javascript to advance to the next slide. It's friendly even for browsers that don't support Javascript or CSS---it falls back to plain text rather nicely.
        I was really excited when I first learned out S5. I did my thesis proposal using it. But I have to say that after that experience, it really wasn't worth it for me. I had to use latex2html for equations which was fine. But to get figures in it to look properly required enough tweaking that the result works poorly on computers with a different screen resolution than I started with. Maybe I could have handled the CSS more carefully and got something more portable, but that would have been even more of a pain than what I did. And I had a directory full of files. Not to mention how poorly embedding animations works.

        Now I use LaTeX Beamer [sourceforge.net] and could not be happier. Maybe S5 would be great for talks that have few or no figures or equations and just bullet points, but that is not enough to help me. With Beamer I get a single pdf with everything and it looks the same regardless of what computer/OS I show it on. All done using nothing more than the free software I normally use.

        It's too bad since I really think S5 is a cool idea.

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by c_sd_m (995261)

          Now I use LaTeX Beamer [sourceforge.net] and could not be happier. Maybe S5 would be great for talks that have few or no figures or equations and just bullet points, but that is not enough to help me. With Beamer I get a single pdf with everything and it looks the same regardless of what computer/OS I show it on. All done using nothing more than the free software I normally use.

          While I do use Beamer (and think it's great) it's not necessarily the greatest solution for talks with many figures. It's great with equations but having to define a grid and explicitly place figures (e.g., to have a column of text on half of the slide with an image next to it) is a pain most of the time. Unless you're comfortable with Pstricks, of course. For anyone familiar with Latex it's well worth learning. Nearly any functionality that you can use in Latex can be used with Beamer. If you're pres

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by cp.tar (871488)

      At least I'll be able to open all the annoying .ppts I get in the mail without having to run OO.o on some ancient computer...

  • No!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by CptPicard (680154) on Wednesday February 07 2007, @09:18AM (#17920250)
    I thought Google was supposed to "do no evil"... why inflict more presentations on mankind? Remember, Powerpoint corrupts absolutely...

  • word, excel (Score:2, Interesting)

    by seasunset (469481)
    I don't mean to troll but they could try to spend some effort in better support word and excel. The majority of documents that I share work flawlessly in OpenOffice on Linux, but the majority doesn't work at all on Google. It would be a fantastic platform for migration from Office on shared environments, if it worked...

    I know, probably some problems are AJAX structural limitations, but, even so, Google could, and should, do better.
  • This is a great idea, I wonder just how complete it will be though... will it support animations?

    You know you all love to make you bullet lists swoop in from all angles! If you've got nothing to say, at least say it with style!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Zarel (900479)

        will it support animations?

        The HTML Canvas tag [wikipedia.org] will probably take care of that. Or they'll have to put everything in Flash, but that's not really a solution to the problem, and not hip & hot Web 2.0.

        IE doesn't support Canvas (without some Novell plugin, at least), so I doubt that. Not that you'd need it; JavaScript can be used to animate things well enough.

        • IE doesn't support Canvas (without some Novell plugin, at least)

          1. It's a Google Plugin [sourceforge.net]. This story is about a Google product.

          2. It's not a "plugin" per se. It's a bit of Javascript that adds compatibility for any webpage that includes it.

          3. As someone else mentioned, it's possible to do most of the Canvas functionality with plain Jane Javascript. It's just a bit slower.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by LauraW (662560)

        will it support animations?

        God, I hope not!

        On the other hand, most of the animations that are used in Powerpoint don't belong there anyway.

        Amen!

        On a semi-related note, here's my favorite PowerPoint presentation [norvig.com], which someone posts a link to every time PowerPoint is discussed at work.

  • don't encourage powerpoints... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lord_Slepnir (585350) on Wednesday February 07 2007, @09:21AM (#17920280) Journal
    And here I was thinking that the lack of support for powerpoints was a feature of google documents. If I have to sit through one more badly-animated snooze fest of some obscure corporate policy, I'm just going to bring my DS into work. And, since the last one I had to sit through was "Appropriate use of company resources during work hours"..... well take a guess as to how effective they were.
    • and everything to do with oratory skills. Powerpoint should merely be visual support; it suits this function perfectly. It's when it takes first stage that it falls apart. However, if you *let* it take first stage..it speaks volume about how interesting you're making your topic. With this in mind, I fully support this move by Google which continues to enhance today's businessman-on-the-go lifestyle.

  • Predictable postings (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna (970587) on Wednesday February 07 2007, @09:22AM (#17920286) Journal
    A slew of postings are expected where /.tters would avow that they will never store their personal data files in google's server and predict that corporations cant afford to send their data to such third party services and so this is unlikely to unseat Microsoft.

    Again many would point out that once Google irons out the kinks using these millions of users as beta testers using spotty and intermittent internet connections to do document creation, they can sell out a Office-in-a-box appliance to corporations. Completely managed by IT, with better intranet speeds these machines can chew big chunks of market out of MS.

    Meanwhile, unmindful of all the implications of security, invasion of privacy and other such trivial concerns, millions of users will use whatever works for them and leave the future to evolve at its own speed and pace.

  • Google is going through all this work to make an online suite comparable to microsoft's ajax. Why can't people be happy with open office? I'm sure there's a way to run it off of a thumb drive on any system that one would reasonably want to work at. (who needs to review documents on a kiosk?)

    In fact, with the frailties of public wireless internet, keeping a persistent session would probably be more of a hurdle than downloading and installing open office. Its tough enough to submit a paper when comcast dec

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ElleyKitten (715519)
      A lot of people do have access to the internet almost all the time. I have internet at home, at work, and at my night classes. What I don't have is access to the same computer all day. With Google, I can make a document (or edit my calendar) and work on it where ever I am without worrying about carrying around thumb drives and forgetting them at home or running out of space, and I can even use a library or a friend's computer without having to make sure my preferred office suite is running on it. So Goog

  • No! Please! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Bullfish (858648) on Wednesday February 07 2007, @09:29AM (#17920374)
    This will just lead to even more of those insufferable powerpoints being mailed around. You know, the ones with someone's favourite tune and pictures of kittens, puppies, babies etc...
  • "...that will likely read and write the most common formats like Microsoft PowerPoint and Open Office Impress."

    Ah, it's a bit much to use the words "common" and "Impress" in the same sentence...

  • visio would be VERY useful (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WindBourne (631190) on Wednesday February 07 2007, @09:58AM (#17920668) Journal
    visio has no decent OSS version and none that will read its format. It would be useful if Google created even a web app of it and perhaps release a library for reading/writing the format.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF (813746)

      visio has no decent OSS version and none that will read its format. It would be useful if Google created even a web app of it and perhaps release a library for reading/writing the format.

      On OS X, Omnigraffle by the Omnigroup seems to win a lot of Visio users over. It can import and export to the Visio XML format and in fact stores info natively in XML. I know one engineering manager who switched to OS X after trying it out on one of his engineer's machines and realizing how much better it was for certai

      • I use OmniGraffle and Visio. OmniGraffle is very easy to use and is very good at staying out of the way when I'm building a diagram. The automated guides, mouseless editing, and tool collections are just right for drawing complex pictures. OmniGraffle is most useful for creating diagrams for presentations (though its presentation mode is a bit flaky, so I tend to export to PowerPoint) and papers. It's also useful for sketching out ideas, but starts to show its limitations as ideas get more complex and s

        • ... I've tried Dia and it pales in comparison - partly due to Gimpishness of the UI, but also just b/c Visio and OmniGraffle are mature applications that have the benefit of years of user feedback.
          So did you offer the Dia team your feedback? Dia's never going to get better without user feedback and development support.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anthracks (532185)
      The closest I've found is Dia [gnome.org], but frankly it's not ready for non-techie users yet. It suffers from GIMP syndrome, where each palette of widgets is its own window in the taskbar, commands have non-standard names for no good reason, etc. We're on a tight IT budget so I tried to win over the couple of users who were asking for Visio, but Dia wasn't up to it and we had to bite the bullet and buy some Visio licenses. If someone turned a couple of UI and process engineers loose on Dia for a while it'd probably b
      • I used to use kivio which was marginally better than dia (about 2 years ago). But the problem with that both were incapable of reading/writing the visio format. Until that is broken, visio (and therefor office) will own the desktop of the tech world. If Google (or one of the major techs) would simply create a library for that, it would literally jumpstart development all over for the visio clones. But since I do not have any ms windows, let alone visio, in my house, it is impossible for me.
  • RTFA and you see that the only basis for supposing this unconfirmed service will support Powerpoint and OO is the author's opinion. It probably will. Be silly if it didn't. But hey.

    Of course, by the time the story has crossed the million miles to Slashdot HQ, it has become "Google Docs to support Powerpoint". Here's a free sub-edit: "Google Docs Preparing Powerpoint Rival?"

  • good reflexes (Score:3, Informative)

    by Meltir (891449) on Wednesday February 07 2007, @10:00AM (#17920688) Homepage
    Amazingly, the website/lang template from tfa (http://docs.google.com/Localizer?f=AllMsgs.hdf), does not contain said entries anymore.
    Try searching it for 'presentation' or anything noted in tfa.
    Dunno if it they were removed, or simply never there.

    Have fun speculating thou.
    Maybe it was just something they wanted to do.
    This may not be traces of any future magic, it maybe something writely was up to before they were bought out by google.

    Yet anotheir ghost feature which someone says they found traces of a while back but noone can confirm today.

    That said, it would be cool to have anotheir alternative to ppoint and impress.
    But i doubt that showing presentations on conferences, at school or work will based solely on this service.
    Other then availability, the same privacy issues as with Gspreadsheets and Gdocs apply.

    • Try searching it for 'presentation' or anything noted in tfa.
      Dunno if it they were removed, or simply never there.
      They can't hide it from the Internet! Try searching through the Google cach--

      Wait. Never mind.
  • Who hasn't had to sit through hours of painfully bad PowerPoint presentations? You know, the type where the presenter has used every transition effect and font available and just sort of stands there watching the viewer reaction as the next painfully rendered lame animation comes up? Where half the audience is thinking "Please God (or FSM), let that notebook HDD end its duty cycle now!"?

    So soon this type of dreck can be developed online, huh? How long before GooPoint joins Flash and the other usual suspec

  • MS Project would be better (Score:5, Interesting)

    by uwbbjai (661340) on Wednesday February 07 2007, @10:19AM (#17920968)
    Having an online project management tool would be way more useful than being able to do presentations or editing spreadsheets online.

    If you work for any company, chances are Word, Excel, Powerpoint would be loaded onto your machine as standard installation. But does everyone get Project as well? unlikely unless you're management.

    With Google Project, at least anyone interested can look at those .mpp files and see how much they've been allocated and their deadlines, be it devs, QA, tech writers...
    • while I see your point on how there isn't really any alternative to Project, its hard not to see that there are many times the people who use Word/Writer, Excel/Calc, and PowerPoint/Impress. Personally, it makes more sense to do the common ones (stated above) first, because you can catch more people, thus making more people aware of GoogleDocs (and other apps). You can have an ass-kicking app, but if nobody knows about it and theres already at least a $300USD app that can do it, pick something like a word p

  • The AdSense Pairings Could Be Hilarious (Score:4, Funny)

    by George Johnston (1018968) on Wednesday February 07 2007, @10:25AM (#17921058) Homepage
    User Dick Harding asks, "Why do all my presentations have Viagra ads on them?"
  • Or they could just go ahead, as rumored [about.com], and buy ThinkFree [thinkfree.com], whose Java-based online office suite has long supported PPT.
  • Without those, I'd hardly call this re-implementation "complete."
  • Meet Google Presently, whose name only marginally beat out heavy contenders Google Naptime and Google Notagain. Google toyed with Ihopetheyturnoffthelightssonobodynoticesmesleeping , but decided it was confusingly similar to PowerPoint.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by the_womble (580291)
      Google has done very little that will lock people into using them.

      Its not being big and having lots of users that is the problem. It is being able to reduce consumer choice that is the problem.

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