During the past week, I’ve begun converting some of my standard conference presentations into Google Docs presentations, so that people anywhere in the world could not only view them more easily, but also so they’d be able to add new material, correct any errors they found, and generally improve on whatever I had done. Two of the presentations had been created in Powerpoint, and it was a relatively straightforward affair to import them into Google Docs, and make them available.

But I then embarked upon a far more ambitious project: I converted the enormous “mind-map” representation I’ve been creating on the subject of Web 2.0 into the Google Docs format. To accomplish this, I first created a presentation document in Apple Keynote, and manually created 108 pages of material from the latest mind-map that I had published (to see more details about that mind-map, click here). This was a tedious, time-consuming process, and there was no practical way to automate it; I’ll answer the obvious question of “Why Keynote?” a little later.

Once the Keynote document was finished, I then exported into a Powerpoint document; this is one of many standard export options available in Powerpoint, and it was … well, somewhat crude, but acceptably adequate. The resulting Powerpoint file required an hour or two of “tweaking” to make it look presentable; and if I had intended to use the Powerpoint file on any kind of long-term basis, I probably would have been more critical of the job Keynote did.

But in fact, the only reason for creating the Powerpoint file was that Google doesn’t know anything about Apple Keynote; it’s only willing to accept Powerpoint, and it limits the import to 10 megabytes. My Keynote file was just under 30 megabytes, and the exported Powerpoint file was about 12 megabytes — so I had to delete some of the JPG graphics to get it down to an acceptable size. After that, it was a purely mechanical process, and I had a rough version of what’s now available as a sharable, modifiable Google Docs presentation on Web 2.0. But even after a couple of hours of tweaking, I still ended up with something I referred to as “Ugly Betty” when I first blogged about it a couple days ago; take a look at that blog posting to get a sense of the different “look and feel” of the Google Docs material, versus the Apple Keynote material.

Here’s a summary of what seems to be lacking in the “presentation documents” created in Google Docs — which may or may not be similar to the strengths/weaknesses of word-processing documents and spreadsheets created by Google Docs:

1. The choice of fonts is very limited in Google Docs — a grand total of six: normal, normal/serif, courier new, trebuchet, and verdana. Maybe this is adequate for people who assume that all Powerpoint presentations should be created in Helvetica or Arial fonts, but it’s pretty boring.
2. The choice of font sizes also seemed limited — but perhaps that’s just because I’m accustomed to using 36-point fonts in a lot of my presentations, and that choice wasn’t available.
3. There’s no way to adjust the spacing between paragraphs on a page. If I have only a few bullet points in a list, I like to spread them out; and if I’m determined to cram a bunch of bullet points into a list on a single page, I need the ability to scrunch the paragraphs together.
4. As far as I can tell, external links (i.e., hyperlinks in the form of a URL) can only be attached to text strings, not to graphic images. This seems like such a major oversight that I’m still convinced that it must be an error on my part; but if so, it means that Google Docs is incredibly user-hostile, because I spent a lot of time unsuccessfully attempting to make it work.
5. While you can attach an external hyperlink to a text string, it doesn’t seem possible to create an internal hyperlink — i.e., a link to some other page in the document. Again, this is so incredibly stupid that I’m still convinced that I just haven’t figured out how to do it. Or maybe it’s on a list of “obvious” features that will show up in some future release of Google Docs. Powerpoint certainly has the features, as does Apple’s Keynote — and it’s very handy if you want to allow people to navigate through your presentation in a non-linear fashion.
6. The biggest limitation: no animation, no “build” capability. Everything that’s on the page just shows up in one fell swoop. I guess I’m not surprised, since roughly 90% of the mind-numbing Powerpoint presentations I’ve seen in the past 20 years (yes, 20 years: Powerpoint was first released as a Macintosh product in 1987) have ignored the use of animations and builds.

Especially regarding the last item on the list, I know what the standard response is: “Google Docs is a simple, light-weight tool, which supports people who want to create simple documents.” Well, that makes a lot of sense with word-processing tools: there are a lot more people writing one-page memos than there are writing 600-page textbooks. And it makes reasonably good sense with spreadsheets: most of us build simple rows and columns of figures, with the “SUM” function to total or sub-total those rows and columns.

But presentations are, by definition, intended for presenting material to an audience. And in today’s TV-saturated, video-savvy, Hollywood-oriented society, the stuff that you can create with Google Docs looks … well, ugly. Or at the very least, pedestrian. Boring. Ho-hum. Just like the Helvetica/Arial-styled bullet-point Powerpoint presentations we’ve seen over and over and over again.

At the same time, the ability to let hundreds of people all over the world view and collaborate on a single document is incredibly powerful; and that alone was sufficient to persuade me to create and upload my Google Docs material on Web 2.0. However, I do present this material to live audiences from time to time — and I see no reason why I should subject them to ugliness. That is why I started with an Apple Keynote document; and that’s why I’ll keep the Apple Keynote document and the Google Docs document synchronized as I continue to update the material in the future. The synchronization process will be manual; I’m simply not willing to spend any more time going through the hours of tedious work to convert Keynote to Powerpoint, and then Powerpoint to Google Docs. To get a sense of what the Apple Keynote document looks like, you can download the 9.5-megabyte PDF document that I exported from Keynote, by clicking here.

It’s quite possible that some of my criticisms of Google Docs are incorrect; as noted above, I may have misunderstood some of its features, in which case I apologize. And I fully expect that some (if not all) of its limitations will be removed in future versions. But for now, all of this leads me to an interesting conclusion regarding the “web as platform” theme often associated with Web 2.0: there may be many scenarios where it’s practical for word-processing and spreadsheets; but it’s going to be a while before Web-based tools like Google Docs are adequate for making presentations to a live audience. Having said that, though, I’m looking forward to seeing what Microsoft has done with its Windows Office Live service, which was just announced today. I’ve registered to become a beta user, and if I succeed, I’ll let you know how it looks …