GoogleDocs took a bite our of my presentation
Oct 19th, 2007 by Karen
Yesterday was not been a particularly good day. I thought I’d try something new and do one of my upcoming presentations in GoogleDocs. I’ve never used the presentation creation functionality before and thought it would be a nice way to learn. Everything started out well. I was able to add nifty pictures to my slides and simple text. But midway through working on one of my few text intensive slides GoogleDocs crashed. As a result I unable to get into the presentation for 2 hours and lost the 2 text intensive slides I’d created. Sigh!
I’ve been in love with Keynote since I first used it but wanted to try another method for presentation creation. In particular, collaborative presentation creation tools since I have several presentations that I’m co-presenting soon. Plus, I always end up putting my slides up on the web. So some sort of web-based presentation software seemed like a good idea. However, as I’ve said before October is a terribly busy month for me so I can’t afford to have technology glitches. I’m going to finish the presentation I’m working on in GoogleDocs but I’m not sure I’ll do any more of the presentations I’m doing this month or the next in GoogleDocs until I’m a little more familiar with its functionality and bugs.
Bummer! I’m sorry you had a bad experience with your presentation. I heard that GDocs crashed yesterday and was down for a few hours. I’ve been using GDocs & Spreadsheets for almost a year and have never had a problem like that, but no doubt those apps are a little more mature.
I use GoogleDocs for written documents for a long time and love it. It has always been reliable. Yesterday, was likely a fluke but one that took place at a really bad and stressful time. I’ve been using Docs without incident today as I did some work on a book chapter.
I just came back from a conference where a number of people had bolted from PowerPoint to either Google Docs or to Open Office Impress. It was good to see this, but more often than not, the people using the non-PP software had some glitch along the way. To my mind, that’s no reason not to forge ahead (when you have the time, that is!), since those tools will just improve with time, and given the fact that Google has more money than god and that Open Office, since it’s OS software, has a huge developer community, it stands to reasons that next year this time they’ll have left PP in the dust.
[...] and I suspect this holds true for the other document editors as well certainly I have recently read one report of a catastrophic crash of the presentation-making [...]