Zoho Show, the online version of Microsoft PowerPoint, recently added a new feature that lets you embed PowerPoint presentations as Flash slideshows in your blog or website.Slideshare [detailed review] is another popular product in the "PowerPoint to Flash" domain that's specifically designed for embedding slideshow in the blog. Now which one do you choose for your PPT slides ? Let's do a quick comparison between Zoho Show and Slideshare. [all points are out of 5]
Zoho Show lets you create new Powerpoint style presentation from scratch or you can import presentations from your hard drive into Zoho and edit them online. Slideshare can only import presentations and once upload, slides cannot be edited. [Zoho 4, Slideshare 2, Weight 20%]
It took few seconds to upload our 150kb PPT file on Zoho and Slideshare though only Zoho sent a confirmation email once the document was uploaded on their servers. [Zoho 5, Slideshare 5, Weight 10%]
Privacy remains a concern on Slideshare as all presentations are public by default. In Zoho you can set presentations as Private but can still embed them inside blogs. [Zoho 4, Slideshare 2, Weight 10%]
When it comes to converting PPT files to Flash, Slideshare beat Zoho by a large margin. Our first presentation had a logo only on the first slide but Zoho replicated that to all other slides during the conversion. Some of text in our second presentation was cut/invisible inside Zoho though both the files were rendered flawlessly by Slideshare. [Zoho 1, Slideshare 4, Weight 40%]
Zoho Show lets you resize the presentation to fit your blog layout but the Slideshare player has a more polished look-n-feel. Secondly, Slideshare supports tags, user comments and slide transcripts something which we missed in Zoho Show [Zoho 2, Slideshare 4, Weight 20%]
As you would have guessed from the scores, the competition was very close.
The editing features offered by Zoho Show are unmatched and a big time saver if you have to update a presentation that's already streamed by 100 other blogs. In Slideshare, you have no option but to delete the existing presentation and reupload it which breaks the code of existing sites that are linking to the original presentation.
Apart from the editing capabilities, if you just want to share powerpoint slides in Flash format, Slideshare is a much better product than Zoho Show both in ease-of-use and conversion features. Final Scores: Zoho Show 2.5, Slideshare 3.5
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/11/sharing-powerpoint-presentations-on.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
Very interesting review. I would expect Zoho to catch upto slideshare at some point. Will be interesting to watch as to which of these 2 are ready to put the time and enery to develop their capabilities as a viable business model
Written on 8/11/06 7:25 AM
Realistically though, how many PPT presentations are only 150kB? In a PPT production environment where I work, 2-3MB is the absolute minimum. Would have been good to see how both cope with uploading of bigger presentations?
Written on 8/11/06 3:44 AM
Hey Amit!
Thanks for the kind words. Of course it's always fun to "win". But we don't see ZohoShow as a competitor to SlideShare at all, simply because their main focus is something we just don't do.
ZohoShow is an "Office 2.0" productivity app, similar to Writely or Google Spreadsheets, and a very good one. It's core value is the ability to author documents online.
We don't do that: we focus on sharing existing documents, and we are agnostic to how they were authored. If Zoho exports to ppt format in the future (something that wouldn't surprise me), then we can expect to see Zoho Show presentations on Slideshare, which would be really cool!
Written on 8/11/06 11:14 AM
Jon,
Our comparison is also based more on the sharing features of the two products.
We wanted to see if users would prefer an application that offers just sharing features like Slideshare or Zoho which offers editing and more.
Amit.
Written on 8/11/06 12:32 PM
Thanks for the nice comparison! We are indeed working on improving the quality of imported presentations. Will keep you updated of developments.
Written on 8/11/06 2:01 PM
I tried Zoho to create a simple presentation to teach my readers how to use the chat feature. I took screenshots, pasted them on the slides and added text and arrows to point out key areas.
When Zoho converted the slides for use online, the arrows and text were off and no amount of futzing with 'em got them to work correctly.
Lost an hour of my time and won't go back to Zoho.
Written on 9/11/06 4:51 PM