Mobilizing Google Slides – or rather, not.

I was particulary excited to see the release of the Google Sildes App for Android the other week. It timed nicely with a trial I’m running with suppling our senior sales staff with Nexus 440x330-nexus-angle110 tablets for field presentations, rather than their clunky (although modern) laptops. As our sales staff are fully ‘Google’ (we use Drive and Apps for all of their collateral, documents and email), it seemed a far more sensible choice to go for the Nexus than iPads, as each account is already there, as are the documents, chat and email.  Also, I really don’t fancy running corporate iTunes accounts.

Before the release of the Slides app, our staff were creating their presentations, then saving them locally to the Nexus from the Drive menu. This was allowing them to present the presentation from PDF format, using Quickoffice, in case their client had no wifi connection. The issue here is that all of their funky transitions and animations were now flattened into the PDF – ‘Less flashy, less cashy’ was a delightful term I’d heard bandied around. Sales pitches love an animation.

Naturally, with the Slides app, we got a bit excited over the prospect of streamlining the whole ordeal. We’d hoped the process would now be:

  1. Create presentation on Laptop in Slides, in Drive
  2. Open in app, on Nexus
  3. Save it to device
  4. Present from in the app, even if there is no wifi.
  5. Make massive sale.
  6. Have party.

So, it comes as somewhat of a surprise to discover that you cannot present in the app if you’re offline. Sure, you can create, edit and muck around with it – but present it? No way! You instead get a wonderful ‘Presentation mode is unavailable Offline’ message. No matter how many times you hammer the present button, it resists your endeavours to get it to use the local copy you just saved RIGHT THERE.

We were so surprised that we assumed we were somehow being stupid – as all the release material states you *can* present offline. We must have made a mistake, surely? So, I have a quick search for anyone else suffering this issue. Nope. No one. Lots of people announcing how awesome the app is, but no one suffering our issue. In fact, it loosk like everyone is talking about using the app… without actually using it.

In our desperation and between bouts of thumping the Nexus against our foreheads, we decided to ask someone who should know. Our Google supplier. Google expert suppliers to the rescue then, surely? Well, no. They’d also not tried it and seemed somewhat surprised when they too encountered the infuriating message. They’ve promised to get back to us as it makes as little sense to them as it does to us.

We’re continuing to hammer away, hoping that this is caused by some weird setting in the Google Apps admin panel, but as it stands, it actually looks like the biggest feature of the Google Slides App for us, is in fact, a dud.

I would say it’s a poor show but I can’t tell, as the show is offline and unavailable.

 

 

 

 

 

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