Google announced today that they have added an online presentation function to their Google Docs and Spreadsheets. The new application is called Google Docs Presentations and its functionality is available under the New menu:
You can import existing PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, OpenOffice files and you can email documents to the application. However, there is no support yet for Apple’s superb Keynote presentation software.
Uploaded presentations render quite well and you have all the usual revisioning and collaborative abilities you have to come to expect from Google Docs.
Nathan Weinberg has a great article on how to embed Google Presentations into blog posts/articles - what is really amazing about this functionality is that it combines GTalk with online presentations - giving the ability to chat and present simultaneously from your blog/website.
This is slowly eating not only into the Office suite of applications but also into the web conferencing arena.
Tom,
OpenOffice presentations (.odp files) are not supported for import yet either. I am assuming (and hoping) this is in the works. It wouldn’t surprise me if Keynote takes priority though :
Richard,
indeed, well spotted.
Strange that they suport OpenDocument text (.odt) and not presentations!