Google Docs: Embedding Presentations

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:

• ExtJS Unit Tests
• Building an n-Tier User Interface

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!