New York — Global search engine titan Google is aiming to put a novel twist targeting the traditional digital presentation format (i.e. Powerpoint), on Tuesday unveiled some significant improvements with a new version of its Googlde Docs presentations web app module with an emphasis on collaborative features, rolling over 50 new tools into its online answer to Microsoft Powerpoint.
The latest release comes a full year and a half after Google originally revised its drawing, spreadsheet, and document editor. This can now be viewed via Google Docs as the Google is previewing a new version of presentations with faster collaboration and more features.
[Image: Google]
The PowerPoint wannabe can now also produce transitions and animations, and its table and drawing capabilities have been beefed up. Moving forward, Google Docs has picked up over 60 new features, as well as a new interface that has spread throughout the Google Apps suite.
Steven Saviano, Software Engineer at Google, poetically described how the company is establishing faster collaboration and more features, more than 50 of them in this most vital update.
In this preoccupied world, presentations are the best media of communication–whether it is presenting your thesis to your professors or motivating colleagues at a conference. And the best presentations are made together, co-operating with others to build a compelling story that captivates your audience.
The search engine company labels it as the first major revision of the service, and it focuses on the flashy side of creating and delivering presentations, adding slide transitions, animations, drawing tools, and data tables. “You are never going to build a product that is awesome for enterprises, if its not awesome for consumers,” Docs product manager Jeff Harris, said in a statement.
The new presentation web app has more than 50 new features, including the following most-requested revamps:
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You can add transitions between slides: Not only can you use simple fades to go from one slide to the next in your presentation, but you now have a gallery of fancier 3D effects at your disposal. This is pretty basic stuff, though, so it’s curious that it took Google so long to add this feature to the app.
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You can add animation to your slides: You always need to be careful with animation, though, because it can rob your presentation of the kind of gravitas you sometimes need for you to be taken seriously by your audience. You can give your presentation a polished look with the new themes that Google has added to the package. A problem with themes, though, is they can give your presentation a “canned” look.
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You can use the app’s new set of drawing tools to build designs, layouts, and flowcharts within a presentation.
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You can jazz up tables included in your slides by merging cells and using the app’s new style options to add some flair to your numbers.
Besides the many options available, users can instantly begin using it by selecting the “Create new presentations with the latest version of the presentation editor” option in the documents settings in the gear icon from the document list.
This preview also carries along 50 more new functions assigned to creating presentations, including transitions, “spicier” 3D effects, animations, flowcharts, richer tables, and new design looks.
Moreover, the company has also revamped the service’s collaboration tools, allowing for in-presentation chats with up to 50 people, and you can now save past versions of your presentations all the way back to the original blank page.
Regardless of many of the new features in presentations that have been available in full featured packages like Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple’s Keynote for years, but as far as the co-ordination goes, the new presentations editor will allow users to see exactly what others are working on, be able to edit files with team members simultaneously from different locations, and see a revision history. Google has also integrated Google Chat for real-time conversations and discussions.
Google Docs is an overall replica of office application that handles word processing, spreadsheets, forms, and drawings as well as PowerPoint-like presentations. Its a centerpiece of Google Apps, the online suite the company has built into a legitimate alternative to Microsoft office. “Google is getting serious about a more coherent set of services underlying all of Google Docs,” said Tom Austin of research firm Gartner Research.
Finally, the latest update is likely to be rolled out gradually across users. Google has also recently updated the three other big modules in Google Docs; the file manager, the word processing module and the spreadsheet one, leaving the user with the ability to switch back whenever they want to.
For more realistic and visual preview, see PCMag’s SlideShow here.