You learn something new every day. Today, I learned that I’ve been living under a rock.
I recently started using Google Docs because a client wanted to share some project-speific documentation with me. I didn’t think much of the tool at first, and the bad press that Google received as a result of the Twitter hackers surely didn’t help my opinion. In all honesty, I just never thought much about how having my documents available online would really be advantageous to me.
About an hour ago, I discovered something that completely changed my mind: I can upload and display Power Point (and similar) presentations within my webpages. I’m amazed that I never knew about this. . . and I feel like my world has just changed completely.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m still hesitant to trust my sensitive documents to cloud computing. Google already knows far too much about me, and even though I’m not rich or famous I still worry about my acounts being hacked and my data deleted.
That being said, Power Point presentations are remarkably useful as an Internet marketing tool. This isn’t exactly breaking news; podcasts and “vlogs” have been around for years and accomplish the same basic idea. They’re great audio/visual tools, fantastic marketing devices and provide great opportunities for search engine optimization. I’ve given a handful of presentations over the past few months and I was wondering how I could more easily distribute my materials – I almost wet my pants when I found this solution.
So if you’re interested, check out my recently published presentations:
To embed a presentation of your own, open your Google Doc and click “Share” in the upper-right-hand corner. Select “Publish / embed” from the drop-down menu, and then click the “Publish” button which appears on the next page. Google provides you with the necessary HTML code. Copy/Paste that code into your webpage and you’re done. Woo-hoo!
About Arthur Kay 
This is indeed a very cool feature. Full disclosure: I’m a member of the Google Docs presentations team
We also launched snap to grid last week.
Very cool, I’ll have to check that out! Given my positive experience with the Power Point presentations, I’m always available to beta test things like this. I also like Google swag… *wink, wink, nudge, nudge*