Google Presentations a quick review

Last night Google took the wraps of its much-awaited presentation app: the latest addition to its office web office suite. Google acquired two startups before with expertise on web-based presentation apps, Tonic and Zenter. Surely this launch is a product of those acquisitions.

The buzz was quite loud that Google will use the TechCrunch40 conference to launch the app, and indeed, Google showcased Presently (its codename for the presentation app) at the said conference

Let’s take a quick glance at what the new Google Presentation app has to offer:

This is the main interface of the presentation app. It sports the familiar UI look and feel that Google Docs and Spreadsheets is known for: simple, intuitive and easy to use. Google’s efforts in making the UI for their office web applications similar and consistent is paying off in flattening the learning curve for new users.

The slides sidebar lets you navigate through your slides and move them around: No drag and drop here, but it’s very easy to use.
The usual top tabs are present: for editing and working with revisions on the left side, and the sharing and publishing options on the right.

On the toolbar area, there are two toolbars: the main toolbar which provides the functionalities that apply to the whole presentation such as themes, slide management (new, duplicate and delete) as well as text and image insertion.

The editing toolbar provides all the rich-text editing functionalities for formatting the presentation content.

As mentioned, Google Presentation has a theme feature that lets you change the appearance of all your slides. There’s enough themes available that will make your presentation look pleasing and appealing.

Different templates for slide layouts are also present, but you can only set this when creating a new slide. You can’t take advantage of the pre-designed layouts when modifying an existing slide.

Starting a presentation shows the interface below, complete with a chat box to allow for discussions among the collaborators during the presentation.

The sharing looks exactly like the ones found in its brother apps, and again, consistency of the UI wins here. You can also publish your presentation as a stand-alone presentation page, which you can share with anyone.

Google Presentation is very easy to use. Although lacking in more advanced presentation features such as animations and timings, this product will capture the hearts of users who wants a quick, easy and installation-free presentation tool.