In the continuing saga of starship “G” vs. the evil empire, here is a story that I almost missed. Gmail has introduced a slide show function that just happens to work with power point files as well. So now you can email that ppt file to your gmail account, go to your presentation, login to gmail and do a web slide show….all through the magic of AJAX. Now, you can’t edit power point files yet, but this feature will be added soon. This is thanks to google acquiring Tonic System. You can find the announcement here.
Google already supports web previews for Word documents and Excel sheets as part of their Google Docs & Spreadsheets program. You can see the pattern here – with every new instant preview, users have less reason to actually buy Microsoft Office. So go signup for a gmail account and choose your side in the coming galactic desktop battle.