Slideshare, a service often referred as "YouTube for Presentations", has expanded beyond PowerPoint slides into other territories like Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.
You can now upload both .doc and .xls files on to SlideShare in addition to PDF and ppt format.
This brings Slideshare in direct competition with other document sharing services like Scribd, DocStoc, Zoho Share and, to some extent, eSnips.
Comparison of Document Sharing Services
| Scribd | Slideshare | DocStoc | Zoho Share | |
| File Size Limit | ? | 100 MB | 50 MB | 3 MB |
| Allows Anonymous Uploads | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| Supports Office 2007 Formats | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Flash Viewer Size (for embedding) | 127 KB | 29 KB | ? | ? |
The following Google Trends chart compares the traffic across different document sites but it may very-well change in future as Slideshare has ventured into waters that were earlier dominated by Scribd.
Like other document sharing services, Slideshare too converts your Office documents in Adobe Flash format for viewing or embedding but they also create a plain text transcript of the document that spiders can read and understand. Therefore any content uploaded on Slideshare has a better chance of ranking in search engines.
The transcripts also come handy when translating documents.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/software/upload-word-documents-excel-sheets-to-slideshare/4925/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
This is an interesting development. Are they also planning to allow editing of docs/ppt/xls online or continue to stay in view only?
I think “view only” has a lot of value as they can position themselves as repository of open/public and shared information / content on the web vis-a-vis google docs/zoho. Thus staying away from direct competition.
Google docus and Zoho are currently positioned as tools for managing personal/priviate/internal information/content in the cloud.
Written by sameer guglani on 10.14.08