Showing Powerpoint presentations via Picasa slideshow

Google have brought together spreadsheets and word processor documents into a combined online service at Google Docs and Spreadsheets.  When compared with a full office suite (ok, or maybe this one), the obvious omission is a presentation module.

However, Google already have a service that partly provides for this - in the slideshow built into Picasa Web Albums.

To illustrate this in use, I took a very well known Powerpoint presentation, and processed it as follows:

• Load the Powerpoint file in Powerpoint
• Select "save as", and select Jpeg as the format, electing to convert the whole presentation when asked
• Upload the individual files to a new album in Picasa Web Albums (either via the Picasa desktop program, one of the Mac uploaders, or simply via the website)
• I then chose to add some "speaker notes" as captions to the individual pictures - unfortunately Picasa Web Albums limits the length of captions to 1024 characters, so you do need to be quite concise.

The result is:

Update - I've removed the direct embed of the slideshow here, since this seems to have stopped working unless you are already logged in to Picasa Web Albums - which is not a very good user experience for many readers of this blog

With many thanks to Peter Norvig, who grants permission to use his presentation in an educational presentation.

 

Yes, the result does lose the slide transitions where they have been used, but in general it seems pretty usable to me.  The speaker notes (captions) can be turned off if desired by the viewer.