April 17th, 2007
Presentations for Google Docs & Spreadsheets
Now this is a first — Google is actually pre-announcing a specific product on the official Google blog. For almost every other product, the announcement isn't made until directly before or after it has already launched.
Anyway, they are now confirming the existence of Google Presently — Google's answer to PowerPoint. The technology behind the product comes from the new acquisition of Tonic. This is important because true compatibility with Microsoft Office is a huge limitation of the current suite of products in Google Docs.
You can technically create and read Microsoft Office compatible documents — but the formatting is not reliable between the two. It appears that Tonic may have the answer to this problem after looking closer at the company.
TonicPoint Builder is a library that provides a 100% Java API to read, create and manipulate PowerPoint presentations. Use the Builder to generate new slides, populate presentation templates or extract data from existing presentations. The Builder supports the standard PowerPoint file format that is used by PowerPoint 97, 2000, XP, 2003, etc.
Accuracy
Faithfulness to the binary PowerPoint (.ppt) file format from PP97–PP2003 and beyond. The PowerPoint file format is a very complex format made more so because of the lack of any documentation from Microsoft. Through many man-years of R&D we understand that format better than any other 3rd party provider. This is why we can produce the range of products we do. This is not a sideline for us. Our products faithfully read and write to that format
Now Google just needs to spend some time or money to make Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets read and write Microsoft Office documents accurately.
Garett Rogers 
is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the wireless industry.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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