Online Presentations 2.0
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!
