Google appears to be extending its online applications push into presentations, in a move that will give its users a new option for web-based tools.

The program, called Presently, has been unearthed  by enthusiasts picking their way through the underlying code of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, the search giant’s wordprocessor and spreadsheet software.

As with those tools, Presently is a pure web-based tool that can be used to create new files and can import popular desktop files such as those with the PowerPoint .ppt file format. Other documents can also be converted into presentations.

The Presently name resembles that of Writely, the web wordprocessor Google acquired with the purchase of Upstartle in March 2006. Google also bolstered its applications offering by buying JotSpot, a maker of wiki-based spreadsheets, calendars and other applications, in October 2006.

With Google Apps for Your Domain,  the company also currently offers calendaring, email, instant messaging and web page design tools.

Google is not alone in seeing the potential of web-based applications. A crop of startups such as Zoho  also offer web-based applications.

Also, in an interview with IT Week in late November, Jacob Jaffe, Microsoft  declined to comment on whether Microsoft is developing web versions of its Office applications.
Proponents of web-based applications point to the low cost, availability from any browser and collaborative support of these programs. However, critics have noted reduced feature sets and limited offline capabilities compared with disk-based apps.

However, some users say the missing features are no major problem.

“While critics will be quick to point out that none of these apps is the feature equivalent – or even the 20 percent equivalent – of the Microsoft counterpart, I frankly don't care,” wrote Paul Kedrosky on the Infectious Greed  blog. “For my entirely self-serving purposes, when I have to do a quick doc, run a spreadsheet, more often than not I use the available Google tool.”