14 DAY TRIAL // Hey, Google Docs users, this one goes out especially for you. All this said in a sort of a Barry White voice.
I know you like the Google Apps even though they are not perfect and I know that you often turn to them when you don't absolutely have to use something else. The Google Presentations seemed to be a viable alternative to Microsoft's PowerPoint but it looked like it's more of an "etch a sketch" variant compared to the Redmond mammoth's own slide possibility.
The update (the first, at that, I might mention) comes with a big surprise: no "export to PowerPoint" option, despite what everybody thought. Instead, what's new is the adding of some minor improvements for managing and customizing the slides.
More slides at a time can be selected now in the traditional way: press Ctrl and select the disparate slides and the Shift key for continuous selections. The classical drag & drop is also usable for the moving of slides and the copying has been improved with the adding of some options regarding it in the contextual menu.
The background can now be changed by uploading an image or by selecting a color while there's still no option for custom themes. The way to go about it is to right click on a slide and to select the "Change Theme" option from the dropdown menu that will appear. However, Google recommends the using of 800x600 images or at the very least the use of images with an aspect ratio of 4:3.
Ionut Alex Chitu found and described on his blog a useful an simple way to import a PPT attachment from GMail to Google Docs: "right-click on the "View as slideshow" link, copy the link location, paste it in the address bar and replace "disp=vgp&view=att" with "disp=attd&view=wtatt". When Google Presentations becomes more powerful, this tip will probably be unnecessary."
I hope the tech talk helps (I haven't tried it out yet) but that may be the first time I'll need to. Just tell me how it worked for you.