The great thing about making slides online is that there’s not need to transfer them from one computer to the next (transferring slides sucks, since on Macs and PCs they may look different). Plus if you collaborate on a presentation (as I often do) everyone can edit the slides online. In fact, you can even gchat while both looking at the slides. Also google office provides automatic back up and version history.

The key drawback of using google presentations though is that the app pretty much blows. It’s just nowhere near Powerpoint. For one, it doesn’t automatically resize text, the one things that makes using Powerpoint super fast. It’s true that Apple’s Keynote doesn’t do this either, but the google program doesn’t even let draw lines and boxes or edit themes. This is particularly frustrating since I was able to import existing slides that contained objects I couldn’t edit or create from scratch. I was also surprised I couldn’t embed content using google video (or google images). Putting video in Powerpoint is risky, so this seemed like a potential major selling point. There was also no way to select multiple objects.

Anyway, here’s my sample presentation. You need a google account to view it, and also it doesn’t show up correctly in Safari. Hopefully this app will get a lot better real soon.