@Yoav – Yeah, I have had clients who have totally used the different apps in ways I could never imagine, using Excel as a database and Word as a spreadsheet! Apparently Google is using open office on the backend for conversion so perhaps the translation might get better between apps?

I’ll take Scott’s point one step further. The real anchor Microsoft has in the corporate environment are the existing documents/spreadsheets/presentations.

A lot of businesses rely on these documents that incorporate some of the “heavy” features for some serious stuff. This is especially true for Microsoft Excel. There are millions of spreadsheets that contain sophisticated formulas/charting/vba. And until Google/any other web app vendor supports those functions fully they will not be able to uproot Microsoft.

In the last excel conference I attended I met an Excel MVP that could do the most amazing things with formulas. When he was asked why he wastes his time with such advanced stuff he said … “you call this a waste of time but I call it job security.” And this is exactly where Google/Yahoo face the biggest challenge.

I just created a quick 8 slide presentation with an “animation” that builds out a complex diagram. To do that, I uploaded multiple images, one per slide, with each image duplicating and adding to the content. A common trick in Powerpoint.

There are two problems with making this work. First, there is no grid/snap/alignment capability for making sure the images precisely overlay the previous images. This is distracting when flipping through the slides, as the image appears to jump around. Second, the images are resized as raster images when viewing the slide shows.

The resizing algorithm in powerpoint seems to handle resizing much better – diagonal lines don’t become jagged, and text (in the image) does not become blocky.

I use this technique a lot in presentations. Until Google allows me to align images and use SVG vector graphics or otherwise make scaling better, I’ll have to pass.

Thanks for telling us about it!