PowerPoint Online vs Slides

March 11, 2025 | Author: Sandeep Sharma
16
PowerPoint Online
Microsoft PowerPoint Online extends your Microsoft PowerPoint experience to the web browser, where you can work with presentations directly on the website where the presentation is stored. PowerPoint Web App is available for personal use in OneDrive, for organizations that have installed and configured Office Online on their SharePoint site, and for professionals and businesses that subscribe to select Office 365 services.
4
Slides
Slides is a place for creating, presenting and sharing slide decks.

PowerPoint Online and Google Slides are, at first glance, eerily similar. Both float around in the mysterious, slightly ethereal realm of cloud-based existence, allowing people to create presentations with an astonishing number of bullet points. They both enable users to collaborate in real time, a phrase which here means "watch helplessly as Dave from Marketing deletes your entire slide while insisting he’s just fixing the font size." You can export your work into various formats, fiddle with animations and choose from an array of templates that range from "Mildly Professional" to "Why Did You Pick That Font?"

PowerPoint Online, a noble offspring of Microsoft’s sprawling empire, first graced the world in 2010, though its desktop ancestor dates back to the era when dinosaurs used floppy disks. It is, in many ways, the more serious of the two, catering to a business crowd that insists on embedding unnecessarily complex Excel charts into every presentation. Unlike its Google counterpart, it clings to the comforting illusion that you might one day work offline, should you find yourself lost in the wilderness with nothing but a laptop and an urgent quarterly report to finish. Naturally, it demands a Microsoft account, because nothing in life is truly free—except, perhaps, regret.

Google Slides, meanwhile, emerged in 2006 as part of Google’s master plan to make sure everything you do is neatly stored in their cloud, even your half-baked presentation about innovative ways to rearrange office furniture. It is the more relaxed of the two, prioritizing collaboration and accessibility over mind-meltingly complex features. It assumes you will never be offline, because why would you ever be? It’s free for individual users, though if you want all the bells, whistles and enterprise-level mind control, you’ll need to upgrade to Google Workspace. And unlike its Microsoft rival, it allows you to share a link with anyone, a feature that usually results in at least one accidental edit from a total stranger in another country.

See also: Top 10 Online Presentations
Author: Sandeep Sharma
Sandeep is a marketing expert with a wealth of knowledge in various domains: customer relationship management, social media management, advertising, search engine optimization, website building, Sandeep has established himself as a multifaceted professional. He honed his skills while working at Salesforce and Hubspot, where he gained invaluable insights into the industry. Now, as the proud owner of a small advertising consulting agency, Sandeep continues to provide innovative and effective strategies to businesses, helping them thrive in the competitive landscape of digital marketing. You can contact Sandeep via email [email protected]