Google Docs Rolls Out the New Collaborative Presentations Editor to Everyone

Google has announced that the revamped presentations editor, which it debuted a few months back, is now ready for the prime time and will be used by default for all new presentations.

The new presentations editor, which was launched significantly later than the documents and spreadsheet editor based on the same technology platform, has been available as an option, but new presentations, by default, still used the old editor.

"We've been busy polishing the app based on your feedback and today we're excited to enable the new editor for all new presentations," Michael Thomas, software engineer at Google, announced.

"We’re also introducing a number of performance improvements and making it easier for you to collaborate by bringing the discussion feature you’ve used in documents to presentations," he said.

The new presentations editor is a major update over the existing one, the last relic of the old set of Docs tools. Google rolled out new editors back in 2010. These new editors were completely rewritten from the ground up and based on a new set of tools to enable real-time collaborative editing and similar features.

It took Google a year and a half to create a new presentations editor based on the same technology. That editor is now ready for everyone to use and Google will be enabling it by default for everyone.

Old presentations will still use the old editor and it may be possible to use the old editor for new presentations as well, but Google wants everyone to migrate to the new tool.

One of the big selling points of the new editor is better collaboration. With that in mind, the editor recently got a new feature, discussions, enabling contributors to talk to each other and comment on the file while creating it.