Who is and what does Google Presentations want? If you’ve missed the news on the presentation held this spring by Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, at the Office 2.0 Expo in San Francisco or you’ve just ignored all speculations regarding Goggle’s intention to offer a web alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite, then it is very possible that you don’t know what Google Presentations is.

Let’s start with the beginning. In April at Tech Office 2.0 Eric Schmidt used a beta version of Google Presentations to display its slides. He said that Google Presentations is based on the technology developed by Tonic System, a company which has acquired by Google earlier this year.

Today Google announced that the new Google Presentations feature is available online at http://docs.google.com, of course as a beta. Also the service that offered Web-based alternatives to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel previously known as Google Documents&Spreadsheets was renamed to Google Docs.

Google Docs is part of Google Apps which has been available as a free service since August 2006. Beside Google Docs, Google Apps includes the large storage-capacity service Gmail, Google Calendar (shared calendaring), Google Talk, which is an instant messaging client, and the Start Page feature for creating a customizable home page on a specific domain.

Earlier this year, in February, Google introduced Google Apps Premier Edition, a service aimed primarily to small and medium businesses, for an annual fee of $50. Unlike the free version, Google Apps Premier Edition offers 10 GBs of storage per user, APIs for business integration, 99.9 % uptime, 24x7 support for critical issues and advertising is optional.

But the lacking of an equivalent for Microsoft PowerPoint was considered by many analysts a weak point of Google Apps. With today’s announcement it seems that the problem has been solved.

But is Google Presentations a threat to Microsoft PowerPoint? The short answer is “Hard to say”

In April when he was asked the same question, Eric Schmidt said: "We don't think it competes with Microsoft, because it doesn't have all the functionality of Office. It's a different way of sharing information, more casual, and a better fit to how people use the Web."

Writing about Google Presentations on The Official Google Blog, Attila Bodis, Software Engineer said that it’s all about sharing and collaboration.

“Maybe more than any other type of document, presentations are created to be shared. But assembling slide decks by emailing them around is as frustrating as it is time-consuming. The new presentations feature of Google Docs helps you to easily organize, share, present, and collaborate on presentations, using only a web browser.” he wrote.

So let’s take a quick look at the service. Using Google Presentations you can create an online presentation or if it is necessary, you can even modify (of course, to a certain point) one that you have already created using Microsoft PowerPoint. Alike the other applications of the Google Docs, Presentations offers too all the basic functions you need, but little to nothing beside that.

If you’ve worked at least a few minutes with one of the applications included in the Google Docs, Documents or Spreadsheets) then it won’t take you any longer to get used with Google presentations. You can import photos from your hard disk, you can edit fonts, the arrangement of the text, the fonts you use, the colors, the background of the presentation and other small details. Google Presentations is even offering a small package of predefined themes, so you can choose the one that suites your needs.

To open a new presentation it is enough to select the Presentation option from the menu where just Document and Spreadsheet used to appear. From this step it is enough to follow the menus, which are simple and clear and if you know exactly what you want to say, in a few minutes your presentation will be ready.

The result of your work can be saved as ZIP and it is obvious that you can copy it onto your computer. You can use a PPT file (the extension that defines presentations created with Microsoft PowerPoint) as a start point for your presentation because Google Presentations is able to import such files from your hard drive without any problems as long as they aren’t password protected or larger than 10 MB. But you can’t save your presentation as PPT file. But if you have a presentation in which you used all the bells and whistles offered by Microsoft PowerPoint (such as animation, transition effects or sound) don’t hope to find them in Google Presentation. Remember I said basic? Even I don’t miss the animations or transition effects the lack o possibility to add sound to a presentation is rather annoying, but let’s hope that in a future version..who knows…

Google Presentations offers also Revisions, which are intermediate saves of your presentation, in caseyou need to restore a presentation to its previous status or track the changes that were made.

But the facility that is really interesting and even unique concerns another aspect, the online collaboration. And only when you hit the Start Presentations button things begin to turn really interesting. You can choose to invite those whom you want to see the presentation, it is enough to send them a link and within a few seconds, you can construct your own online auditorium, which will be permitted to comment about you presentation through Google Talk. By hitting the Share button you can create quickly invite people as viewers or collaborators. The people you define as collaborators may edit your presentation or even invite more people, if you decided to give them that level of access. Of course, thanks to integrtation with Gmail you can define your collaborators from your contacts list.

The simplicity and the efficiency with which Presentations make this possible couldn’t even be equaled by Microsoft and its PowerPoint.

Of course I could tell you now about how Google is planning to take Microsoft’s place in the field of Office applications, about how the software-as-a-service will soon become more important than the classic Office suites that need to be installed or about how some people don’t feel comfortable to leave their presentations on Google’s servers.

But all these are theories and are more or less important. What you ought to keep in mind is that Google offers you the ideal tool that helps you get involved your colleagues, friends, partners or whoever you want in the process of creating a presentation.

All is simple and it happens instantly, all you need is a browser and an Internet connection.

So if you really have to do a presentation…go work!