Well, I think I may have missed this earlier, but Google has finally released its Google Presentations software as part of its Google Office suite. I've been kicking the tires and seeing how it compares to the ol' PPT. A few features I noticed right off the bat--it runs full screen in Firefox, and allows importing of PPTs. It will also be very easy (a no brainer, really) to make your PPTs freely available on the net.

It also has a chat box to invite people to "meetings." We saw something like this in the earlier spreadsheets program, and it's exciting to see it here. It also does versioning and has support for online collaboration--major pluses for anyone working at a distance. Since everything is stored on Google's servers, you don't have to muck about with thumbdrives or your school's LMS. Group presentations just got so much easier to prepare!

Just imagine putting together a conference panel with this app. Everyone could collaborate on the slides and hopefully have some actual coherence to the panel! Oh, did I mention it exports as an .html, already pre-zipped for your convenience? Or think about the online conferencing possibilities...Heck, *I* could host an online conference with this tool.

There are 15 themes available and limited support for importing images, but I didn't see custom animation, cliparts, or slide transitions. Not a big deal for many people, and for God's sake, if you're using clip art or sounds between slides please make it stop.

While I don't see this as a PPT killer, it does score major points for accessibility. I can easily see students or teachers using this as an easy way to share their presentations. As for lacking that "WOW" factor of PPT, I daresay that just using something like this INSTEAD of PPT at a conference might generate some "WOW," particularly among folks who despise Microsoft, Apple, IBM, and Sun.