Online Presentations 2.0
by
on December 04, 2006,
Online PowerPoint presentations are now accessible and sharable with two new free online Web 2.0 products: SlideShare and Zoho Show. The struggle to access PowerPoint type presentations through an Internet browser has been a challenge for many years. Microsoft, Adobe and many other vendors have attempted to bend their products to be “Internet ready”. All have failed.
The struggle to access PowerPoint type presentations through an Internet browser has been a challenge for many years. Microsoft, Adobe and many other vendors have attempted to bend their products to be “Internet ready”. All have failed.Two new Web 2.0 products in the offering aim to change that - SlideShare and Zoho Show.
SlideShare is a great service since the look and feel of it is very familiar and “YouTube“ish. Presentations can be imported and embedded on your website or blog with a snippet of code - a process now familiar to every blog and web site owner. There is the ability to click forward, back, visit the original location of the file on SlideShare and even add tags so others looking for something on your topic will find you. It brings presentations to a whole new level… and I love it!
Limitations to SlideShare also exist, of course. Fancy transitions don’t transfer over to the online presentation and it is not possible to edit online (only replace it with a new version of the file). If you are looking for something a little bit more completely “PowerPoint-like” on the spot, then Zoho Show is your answer. This great service also allows uploading of .ppt files as well as embedding and sharing, as does SlideShare. It also goes one step further by allowing full online editing of the presentation - a feature not available in SlideShare. While these features seem to make Zoho Show a better product than SlideShare, I must admit adding it to a blog is much more of a chore since it doesn’t have the same intuitive controls. Your viewer may figure out clicking the slide will forward it to the next one but to return the presentation to the previous slide - a serious drawback.
If you make presentations at all, consider having a look at these products (the price, as with all these Web 2.0 offerings, is certainly great - free!). One caveat to remember with any online presentation service… always be sure to have a copy of your presentation with you in some form anyway. There’s nothing worse than showing up to do a presentation and learn there’s no access to the Internet!
This article was written exclusively for Profy.com by Technology Evangelist, Presenter and Consultant Robert Sanzalone. To learn how you can improve your business through blogging, podcasting and other online strategies, contact him by Skype or visit http://www.pacificIT.ca.
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Svetlana Gladkova
Lotusopal
Peet McKimmie 
65bus 
Irel Johnson
Robert,
I am wondering if you have had a chance to look at ThinkFree Online (www.thinkfree.com). We have a presentation application called ThinkFree Show, which looks and feels very similar to PowerPoint.
ThinkFree Online is a full office suite that offers robust functionality. We operate in two modes, Quick Edit, for when you need to work and run, or Power Edit when you need to take the time to create a richly formatted document.
Our Power Edit mode has the highest level of functionality around. Because we started building our application in 1999 based on MS Office formats, we also take pride in the fact that we have the highest level of MS Office compatibility available. We handle documents that other applications just don’t open.
We are also the only office suite that is round trip compatible. So, no matter how many times a document is edited in ThinkFree of Microsoft Office, we don’t lose your data or alter the format of your file.
We have collaboration features, version management, publishing live documents to blogs, mash-ups with Flickr, del.icio.us, Creative Commons, and let you share documents using your own email application.
I’d be interested in knowing what you think.
Thanks,
Jonathan
Nice post, Robert! Thanks for writing about Zoho Show
Yes, we have to be a little more intuitive when it comes to exposing our features. We are working on having the ‘Previous’/'Next’ arrow buttons on each slide. Even now you can use the ‘Set slide show timing’ feature under the ‘Actions’ menu to set time between slides while embedding a presentation in your blog. The slides will automatically run then according to the set time interval.
We are working on some cool new features in Zoho Show as well as in other Zoho services. Watch out for more from Zoho.