Google recently launched its much awaited web-based competitor to PowerPoint.

Google Presentations, which is free, is part of the company’s online office suite, Google Docs.

Presentations has some of the same basic functionality as Microsoft’s PowerPoint. It enables you to create some really basic presentation, with theme, but the lack of features and slide show are real turn offs for those who are accustomed to PowerPoint. Although there are some nice collaboration features the final product is not on par with PowerPoint. The omission of basic animations and transitions really take away from it.

PowerPoint-style presentations have two major objectives. Those are to inform the people to whom you are presenting and to hold their attention. Those who are familiar with PowerPoint do not feel great about using Google Presentations on an important presentation, where they need to impress people. The presentations that it creates just do not have the “wow” factor.

However the advantage of Google Presentations is the collaboration feature where other people can collaborate on the same presentation and when you are done, you can either share it via a public URL or present it to a group of people that you invite. Here no doubt Google has got it right. But the limited features of Google Presentations leaves it way behind PowerPoint. There is not just enough to get people to switch from PowerPoint. Simple many times is better but in this case simple is not better.

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