<!–:st–>A major upgrade for Google slideshows. <!–st:–>
Google has released a major update to Presentation, its slideshow maker application in Google Apps. Presentation received transitions such as simple fades and 3D effects, and animations such as fly in and out, zoom in and appear on click.
Presentation also has 16 themes, though these are mainly basic colour gradients and far less sophisticated than Microsoft PowerPoint’s 50-plus themes and 15 templates.
Two other highlights were drawing tools for creating designs, layouts and flowcharts; and richer tables that could merge cells and add more style options to data.
On the collaborative side, Google added coloured presence markers to show which sections or objects in a slideshow were being edited by colleagues. As with the other applications in the Google Docs platform, users could view revision history to see a list of changes by time and date, and start a chat conversation within the spreadsheet with co-editors and viewers.
Presentations could be downloaded as a PDF, Microsoft PPT or .text file. Google Presentation can also publish slideshows in a website.
Prior to the upgrade Presentation had very basic tools. Users could only add text and images to slides.