Search Engine Journal

Google’s GMail has now gone all out with their PowerPoint Preview which lets GMail users open PowerPoint and similar files by clicking “View as Slideshow.”

GMail already previews Word and Excel based documents in the form of Google Documents, along with HTML. They have been testing the PowerPoint review in GMail for a while, but have now made it a default option for messages sent with PowerPoint files.

Philipp Lensenn notes that such as rollout gives users less of a reason to purchase Microsoft Office, as the Google GMail previews do serve as somewhat of a replacement.

However, substituting an Office Suite with Google Docs & Spreadsheets is never going to be a reality for the masses until Google works with Sun’s OpenOffice.org to offer an entire, perhaps even web based, suite of Office tools.