Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I'm feeling entirely presentable, thank you very much.
The reason I am feeling entirely presentable because I have decided to do an entire presentation
using the free presentation tool in Google Drive.
I don't even know what they call it.
I've used PowerPoint in the past.
I know what that's called.
I've used Keynote in the past.
I know what that's called.
I even remember using a tool called Aldus Persuasion way back in the day and all of
these were great slideshow presentation tools.
Well, Google's had a free presentation took as part of their suite of tools since day
1 and I've never given it the time of day.
I don't know why.
Maybe it's just because I think it's free; how good can it be?
Well, shall we figure that out?
I think we shall.
Over the past few months, I have shown you almost all of the different Google Drive features.
I have talked a lot about documents.
I've shown you the spreadsheet tool.
I've shown you the forms tool which, as you know, is awesome.
But the one tool that I haven't spent much time on or any time on is the presentation
tool.
I don't know why I haven't.
It's almost like I think that's a tool that you have to spend money on, a presentation
tool, because it's—I don't know—is it more difficult?
I just probably somewhere in my brain don't believe that a free tool can do as good a
job as the paid tools that I use.
I'm speaking of course of Keynote and PowerPoint.
But I thought we should take a look at it because it is free and it probably does do
an awful lot of what we're looking for.
So let's dive in and have a look.
Now when you start a presentation using the Google Drive, you then are brought right into
immediately a theme picker, very similar to what you would get if you started out with
PowerPoint or Keynote.
There you're going to be given themes to choose from where they've chosen the background,
the font and that sort of stuff.
Now they haven't got quite as many themes as you're going to find nor are they quite
as gorgeous as you're going to find in Keynote or in PowerPoint but some of them are actually
darn ugly but they are free and they do suffice.
Now you can start by choosing the format, the slide format that you want, whether you
want Standard, Widescreen, the 16 x 10 newer Widescreen or the 4 x 3, the old school format.
I'll just leave mine widescreen 16 x 9 because that's what I like and then you choose a theme.
Now here's my thought process as I started to use this because I'm actually using this
tool for some presentations that I'm giving this week.
I know that when I create presentations in Keynote or in PowerPoint that I often end
up getting lost in the minutiae of building the slideshow, of this transition being absolutely
perfect and that transition working the way I want, and then planning to add some—oh
no, I've used two wipes; I'm going to use fade this time.
I'm going to use a cross fade.
I'm going to use a spin in.
What does that look like?
Then I lose track of my content which is so important.
So I was thinking if I'm going to go down this route, I'm going to look for clean and
simple as far as creating my presentations.
I'm going to concentrate on what's valuable, the content within the presentation and be
kind of minimalistic about my presentation graphics and that sort of stuff.
I just chose the Modern theme for this first little demo that I'm going to be showing you
here.
Now I've already pre-baked a few of the slides so you don't have to wait for me to type them
all in.
Here's my great presentation.
It's Steve's Take on Everything in this simple format.
I've got a great point that I'm going to make with interesting stuff and then I'm going
to wrap things up with more interesting stuff and perhaps a graphic.
Now what do you need when you create a presentation?
You need a title slide and then you need content slides.
We have all of those set within this format.
If we take a look here, this is the thing about the Google presentation tool.
All of the tools are right here and there are only a few of them.
It doesn't do an awful lot of, as I say, the fancy stuff but it does the basic stuff.
So the expected things are going to be here.
If you need to choose a layout, for example you need a title slide or a content slide,
this is where you can change the basic format of the slide that you're looking at.
It's set right within the Layout area.
If you want to go into the Theme area, you can actually go and you can choose and change
the theme that you've chosen from all of the—I doubt I'll be choosing the Color Strip or
the Western theme; I'm just saying.
Stick with the simple ones.
You can probably design your own look and graphic as well if you choose to do that but
you've got those basic tools.
Then we've also got there the transition tools which allow us to apply transitions to the
slides.
You're not going to have the wonderful cube rotations and all that kind of stuff as we
see in some of the other packages.
These are going to be very basic, simple transitions.
Let's actually go to the second slide here and let's create—I actually started to create
it already.
I applied a fade transition to the slide itself and then if I click on the content area within
it, I can add an animation so that my bullets will come in one after the other.
Again, it's nothing fancy.
You can choose fade, fly in, fly out, zoom or spin in.
Well, let's just leave fade because that's going to look best.
On-click or Timed ones, so you can time it out which is good.
Then By Paragraph means that just every time I put a character return in, it's going to
add it.
Then you can preview it.
You can preview how it's going to look.
Again, not super fancy but what you need is a presenter, your title slide, now your bullet
points as you speak when I click the mouse, pretty much exactly what I'd expect and what
I can take advantage of as I create it.
Now the way that they work as far as their actual slide layout goes is when you type
in information, it doesn't automatically create bullet points so you have to add the bullet
points yourself.
So if I wanted to add the bullet point to this, I have to click here.
Again, remember how I said that you don't have to look very far for all of the tools?
They're just right within here.
Go over to the Text Tools.
You don't see the bullets, obviously well just look for something like More.
Click on the More and now we can add numbered bullets as opposed to the bullet bullets which
I had in the first slide, all very simple and very straightforward.
The one thing that I haven't talked about is adding graphics.
It's not quite as simple and convenient to add graphics to this.
You can't just drag it onto the page but it is easy to add a graphic just by clicking
on the Insert Graphic and then you can choose to upload it.
This is very similar to how you do with any web-based tool.
If I wanted to add the Evernote logo that I have for the presentation to this, I would
bring in the Evernote logo and then I can position it wherever I want.
I could again make it an item that has a transition for when it comes in so I can bring on graphics
at different times.
I can add graphical elements to the slide.
Now if I need to brand all of my slides, say my whole talk was about Evernote and I wanted
that Evernote logo in all of the slides, I would just right-click my mouse on that graphic—for
some reason it seems to pop over; there we go—add it to the theme and then I could
choose which of the slides I want to add that graphic to and then it's going to be on each
and every one of those slides.
So if you need your company logo or if you need a graphic like this added to all of the
slides, you can do this so you don't have to go through each one and import.
So again, it's not super fancy but it's doing the job.
It's doing all of the things that I need.
If we need to insert some other type of content, you could go in and we can insert things like
videos.
You can create word art to create fancy titles.
You can create different shapes and you could import animations and other resources that
you want to bring to the table.
Again, not super fancy but functional, all of the main things that we need as far as
functionality is concerned.
Finally, what are the strengths of it?
So far, I've talked about the fact that it doesn't do anything quite as well but it does
it all well enough.
The strengths are when we start thinking about creating collaborative documents.
The strengths of Google Drive overall?
The fact it's cloud-based service and we can create a shared version of our document that
we can have multiple people work on and be able to collaborate on so we can have our
whole team, regardless of where they are in the world, editing and managing this document
ourselves.
Plus, it does a really nice job of incorporating comments from each and every person.
We can add comments there or right from here inserting comments, especially for presentation
work.
People will say should be saying this or maybe we should be moving this up.
Comments are a tremendous tool when you're collaboratively building this sort of a document.
Finally, this is well and good, Steve, except so often you go into a presentation hall to
give a presentation and they don't have Wi-Fi and you're not online.
What are you going to do then, bright Dotto, because it's all in the cloud, is it not?
Yes, it is.
You're absolutely right.
It is on the cloud but if we simply go under the File menu and choose Download As, now
we have the option to download the entire finished presentation as a PowerPoint slideshow
meaning we could open it in PowerPoint if we want to and we can even edit it and add
to is in PowerPoint and certainly play it back in PowerPoint or we could also download
it as a PDF, which means that we can then just have any PDF viewer to allow us to play
it back.
That's super, especially if we're going to be presenting from a tablet or something like
that.
So we've got lots of different options as far as finally using this presentation.
As I said, I'm going to be trying it out this week.
I've got an online presentation that I'm giving and a physical presentation I'm giving in
person and I'm going to be using this tool instead of PowerPoint or in this case Keynote
for all of those talks.
So we'll see how it goes but I've got tremendous confidence that it's going to work.
You know what?
If I didn't have confidence it was going to work, I wouldn't use it because I wouldn't
take a chance, but this is allowing me to concentrate on what's important -- the content
in the slides and spend a little bit less time worrying about all the froufrou [phonetic
00:09:56] around the slides That's it for today.
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With that, I am done for the day.
I've got to get working on my presentation.
You get working on yours.
Have fun storming the castle!