What are Presentation Design Cloud Apps? Think Google Docs Presentations. Or 280slides. Or SlideRocket. When you access any of these three (currently free) online apps, you can design a presentation "in the cloud". (That's what the kids are calling it these days!) Loosely speaking, designing in "the cloud" means you can produce your presentation content online, without downloading any presentation software to your computer.


Enjoying the Cloud Slideware Experience. Earlier this week, I tried each of the three cloud slideware applications I mentioned above -- Google Docs, 280slides, and SlideRocket. Before I discuss their differences, let me comment on four similarities and user advantages you get with cloud slideware:

1) They're all feature light. At this stage, cloud presentation design apps are light on features. Well, much lighter than the gazillions of options PowerPoint and Keynote and Open Office pack into their software, anyway! But why do I tout less features as "an advantage"? Face it: we've all noted an alarming tendency of PowerPoint producers to over-use many features. Feature abuse often detracts from the story line. By streamlining features, the tendency to overwhelm with special effects is mercifully reduced. Further, less features mean that learning how to use cloud applications is usually a breeze. Basically, if you know how to use PowerPoint -- you already know how to useSlideRocket, 280Slides, or the Google Docs Presentation application. Seriously: expect a learning curve of about a minute or three.

2) Cloud presentation apps allow collaboration and sharing. With a few clicks, 280slides lets you post your presentation to SlideShare, the popular presentation sharing site. The "Share" button at Google Docs Presentation lets you invite collaborators to edit your presentation, or viewers to experience your results. SlideRocket lets you publish your presentation publicly -- or to invite select people to view it. SlideRocket also integrates statistics, so you know how many people have experienced your content. Google Docs lets you see who has been editing your presentation -- and when. For those of us who build content in teams located all over the globe, the ability to share, collaborate, and review revisions provides a phenomenal project management advantage.

3) Cloud apps play nicely with many other popular online content venues. Want to insert a YouTube video into PowerPoint? You've got quite a few gyrations to make that happen! But with two of the presentation design cloudware options, it's a coupla clicks, tops. Want to use a FlickR image into your presentation? Each of the cloudware apps I used let you search and add unique FlickR images with the same ease you'd have inserting a stale piece of clipart to a PowerPoint presentation. Easy access to fresh videos and pictures can make your presentation more visually unique and compelling than sticking to the over-used, cliched, packaged stock images and clip art built into standard software.

4) They all cater to the offline popularity of PowerPoint. Each cloudware service lets you download and save your presentation as a PowerPoint file. And each service also lets you upload a presentation that you originally created in PowerPoint. Many folks need the security blanket of backing up a presentation on a hard drive -- and in a familiar format. With cloudware, you don't really have to leave your PowerPoint comfort zone. You have the option to "go old school" with PowerPoint -- but you also get enhanced sharing and easier access to online content.