Just think of a situation where you are on a vacation, travelling to a friends place and your boss calls you to create one urgent presentation. Later you realize that, your friend does not have office installed on his machine.  Now when creating a presentation is seriosly a challenge for you, thats where an online office tools comes handy. More Good, you can even present it online, virtually!

You do not need to purchase license to use Online docs. Also. you can very well use it as an economical solution for project discussions and personal projects.

Docs is a free service from Google, which provides you the same functionalities of Word, Excel and PowerPoint  – online. This means, you dont need Office to be installed on your machine. All you need is Internet and just your gmail id (I guess, everyone has it by now.!). Google Docs provides  these following capabilites,

• Share and Collaborate on office documents online.
• Create office documents online or upload existing ones (DOC, XLS, ODT, ODS, RTF, CSV, PPT, etc.)
• Familiar Microsoft Office style interface and features (bold, underline, indent, change the font/number format, change background colors, etc.)
• Sharing: invite other people to view your documents / spreadsheets / presentations.
• Collaboration: let others (colleagues, project members, etc.) edit and contribute to your files.
• Changes History: View by whom and when document was edited, what changes were made, and (if necessary) revert the document to any earlier version.
• Organize your files by folders, by tags, or both
• Integarted chat window.
• Publish and showcase documents on a webpage. and lots more …

Ten Simple Steps to Create a simple Powerpoint Presentation

Step 1: Login with your gmail id, at http://docs.google.com/

Step 2: Once you login, you will have a workspace area to work with your documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Just below the logo, you will find the “Create New” button, when you click on that, you will have all the available options. Select Presentation there.

Step 3: Now you have an empty presentation being created in your workspace. The look and feel doesnt look like a web application at all!

Step 4: You can goto the Format Menu item and change the presentation Theme or Background. There are lots of templates and themes available!

Step 5: As you would do on any desktop office client, you can click on the new slide button, and select the Slide Design.

Step 6: If you need to insert a drawing, Shape or an Image, You can goto the Insert Menu item and select the same. Once you select image, You have options to select the image as a URL image or even a web upload!

Step 7: If you need to insert Tables to your slide deck, you can use the Table Menu item, and select the number of Rows and Colums.

Step 8: One very cool option, which I like about this Online google docs is the Speaker Notes option, a small window pops up, which enables you to enter the Speaker notes which you wanna mention. Real nice thing!

Step 9: You can start the presentation, either by clicking on the ‘View menu -> Start Presentation’ or click the Start Presentation Button.

This will start the presentation of the powerpoint which you just created, You can hit F11 key for full screen mode!

Step 10: You can now share the presentation through email attachment, give a link to the presentation.. so that one can watch it online in Google Docs and even Embed this presentation to your website too..!

That completes your first presentation on Google Docs..!