Google releases collaboration-centric presentation tool

Google has released its online presentation creation tool

Google has updated its online Documents service with the addition of a Powerpoint-like presentation creation tool, called Presentations.

The online only tool is available as standard to both consumer and enterprise customers as of today.

Although the tool does not share all of the functions of the office applications that many employees use on a daily basis, Google explained that had focused on ease of use, and as such the tool was designed to make collaboration easier for teams of distributed workers. An audit trail of corrections and alterations does this by letting editors know who has changed what and when in a document.

Document changes can be viewed by anyone invited to participate, while overall control can be switched between editors with the click of a button. Google said that this was much easier than collating a number of different versions of the same edited document and then making sense of all of the different edits. As the document is shared, using a simple invite function, editors can chat between themselves and with viewers in real-time via Google's integrated chat function.

As with many of Google's services Documents is currently in beta. In keeping with this, Dave Armstrong, Product Marketing Manager at Google said that further features would be added in time.

The service is available now with support for twenty five languages.