Quip, the productivity platform that Salesforce.com Inc. acquired for $750 million in 2016, offers many of the same capabilities as Office 365. It includes document and spreadsheet editing tools as well as various collaboration features, but has so far lacked an equivalent to PowerPoint for creating business presentations.

Salesforce today is filling the gap with the introduction of Quip Slides. Like the rest of the platform, the tool was built with an emphasis on projects that involve multiple users.

Alongside the various slide editing options, which appear in a compact single-row toolbar that brings the G Suite interface to mind, Quip Slides provides multiple ways for authors to collaborate. Users can leave comments on a presentation file or start a longer conversation with colleagues via a built-in chat function. In addition, the tool includes co-editing support that makes it possible to see changes made by another user immediately.

The features are part of what Salesforce described as Quip Slides’ focus on “social presentations.” According to the company, the tool is specifically designed to help users create materials for meetings such as brainstorming sessions that have a collaborative element.

The most distinctive feature that Salesforce has implemented to that end is the ability to embed what it calls interactive feedback prompts into slides. According to the company, these are ready-made elements much like the prepackaged diagram templates in PowerPoint that let meeting participants share input about the topic of a presentation. For example, a slide that lays out strategy options for an ad campaign might include a prompt asking participants if they believe the budget should be increased.

Users can also add other elements to slides. Among other things, Quip Slides provides the ability to create data visualizations that connect to a Quip spreadsheet or a Salesforce dashboard and automatically refresh when the source file changes. The tool also draws on the Quip platform’s existing Live Apps, which are extensions that make it possible to access external services such as Dropbox via the native interface.

Rounding out the feature set is an analytics dashboard for measuring engagement. The console provides insight into presentation open rates and related metrics, while displaying suggestions, generated by Salesforce’s Einstein artificial intelligence, on how to engage with recipients.

Now that it can be used to create presentations, Quip is positioned as a much better-rounded alternative to Office 365. Salesforce competes with Microsoft Corp. in other areas well, including its core customer relationship management market but at the same time provides integrations for a few of the technology giant’s products.

Image: Salesforce