“Living In The Google World” Noon Day 4 – Crash and burn

(here’s a short update half way through Day 4 of “Living In The Google World”.)

Oh boy…I crashed and burned on using the Google presentation tool. 

I tried, really, even accepting that I would have a simple plain b&w presentation which will emphasize the content over the presentation aesthetics.

I gave up when the bullet points on my bullet point list drew inside of the first character of the line. The same thing happened when I tried to create a numbered list. No dice. 

So I happily googled “best online presentation tool” and found SlideRocket, currently in beta.

It looked slick, had an Adobe Air desktop “offline interface” and had some nice cool looking transitions and a cool looking blue slide background. 

After exporting my Google presentation to PPT and then importing to SlideRocket, I just started working. Trying to make up for the time I lost futzing with the Google presentation app, finding SlideRocket, installing the offline interface, etc. 

After about 10 minutes of seeing that simple things like change the color of the background on a selected list of slides was more complicated than simply selecting the slides I want changed and then applying a new color, I gave up. 

Don’t get me wrong, SlideRocket looks like a great tool and I’m hoping they continue their lead in the online presentation space because it will rock when all the bits and pieces are worked out. 

After deciding I was spending too much time trying to figure out how to get my online apps to work at putting text on a page and things like that, I had to punt and go back to trusty Powerpoint. 

Strike 1 for “Living In The Google World”.