OverLinked

Google added some much needed functionality to their Presentations product (part of Google Apps / Docs) that now almost makes it equivalent to Microsoft PowerPoint as far as the core feature set goes. They have a list of enhancements that came out listed here, but the major ones as far as I’m concerned are: Animations, Enhanced transitions and Shape linking.

Slide Animations - This is a critical part of any Powerpoint ninja’s repertoire. Now finally we’re able to create more interesting animations to bring results alive on a slide. Currently they have about 6 different animations available but hopefully more will roll out.

Enhanced Transitions – Moving slide to slide is always a necessity, and although I don’t usually like to use involved transitions because it usually takes the focus away from your presentation to the technology driving your presentation, I realize that it has it’s place. More work seems to be needed on this aspect, however, as some transitions like “Cube” works well when you have light colors as the majority of a slide, however if black is the main color, transitions like “Cube” seem a bit awkward and clunky.

Shape Linking - This is an excellent tool that not enough people use in whatever platform they’re working in. Now you can link any shape in your google presentation to a) another slide b) a specific url or c) an email address. This is great if you want to do simple wireframes of a website in your google doc or use it to other resources (like publicly shared google docs, or google sites or another cloud service). Right clicking is supported which is awesome. Note too, that you can link other things besides shapes, like lines, words and images. You need to use the hyperlink icon for this, as currently I’m not seeing an option to link to these things under a right click context menu.

All in all, these are important elements that have been keeping me from using google’s presentations product. We’ll have to see if presentations can now completely rival Microsoft’s product or if MS still has the upper hand here.