Bye Bye PowerPoint
Not that I used it to tell the truth. It’s several years now, at least since the millennium turned, that I only use OpenOffice and, since a few days, StarOffice on the laptop because I download it with Google Pack, but they’re virtually identical.
But let me go back to the main subject: Google Docs now has a presentation editor beside the word processor and spreadsheet. We can now freely say that there is a, office suite -free and online- that can fully replace the basic version of MS Office.
Google introduced this PowerPoint/Impress clone without clamour, no fanfare at all, it just became available through the Google Docs interface.
Maybe it is true that Google is going to be a world-dominating monopoly… but right now it is giving us several useful and interesting things. This could also be the right jemmy to unhinge Office’s hegemony. An hegemony that has a reason to exist in the corporate world, where 100% compatibility is really crucial. But for students, professionals, small businesses and common users that egemony is more the result of how easy it is to find a pirated copy and also a consequence of the fact that many are not aware of other good alternative solutions and also because, through lack of knowledge, many are somewhat afraid of leaving a de facto standard such as MS Office.
PowerPoint especially ha become a sort of wild card tool that is used in the most perverse ways to create stuff that has nothing in common with presentations… I keep cringing when I see whole websites (such as www.utrtek.it with it’s circus-like look) or even print brochures and booklets created with PowerPoint.
PowerPoint winning feature? it is easy to use and makes every use an expert communicator, thanks to abominations like widespread and casually used animations. Question: how many flying titles can you stand in an hour long presentation? (The title, of course, flies in to a swooshing sound and it’s obviously an acid green or orange Word Art… .
Google’s presentation editor offers a dozen of themes and it’s rather easy to use. Uploading and inserting images is quick and easy. The user interface is less sophisticated than its desktop equivalent, but this might be a plus: maybe users will be less tempted to create presentations as much baroque and extravagant as they’re missing their communicative goal.
