Salesforce’s Quip is rolling out a presentation slide builder that it promises is not your father’s PowerPoint. (Salesforce Image)

For all the advancement in technology we’ve seen over the past few decades, the holy trinity of the information worker remains the word processor, the spreadsheet, and the presentation slide builder. Quip added the third leg of that stool Tuesday with Quip Slides, a slide builder for a generation raised on social media.

Quip, acquired by Salesforce in 2016, has been working on its PowerPoint rival for a year and a half, said Quip co-founder and CEO Kevin Gibbs. The philosophy behind Quip Slides is that most presentations are created for internal use, rather than unveiling iPhones on stage in front of a huge audience, and therefore don’t need all the fancy transitions and effects that can be found on the most popular office productivity suites from Microsoft, Google, and Apple, he said.

“We’re trying to break free from the legacy of those products,” Gibbs said. “These other products … have decades of experience, and decades of things that they’ve built into them. But their starting point is from a much earlier time, and they’re actually a product that doesn’t fit people’s needs as well as I think it should.”

You can embed questions and polls within Quip Slides. (Salesforce Image)

A lot of the features in Quip Slides will be familiar to anyone who has used Office 365 or G Suite to create presentations that can be viewed and edited by a team of colleagues, such as chat, commenting, and questions. But thanks to its corporate parent, Quip Slides can surface Salesforce data directly within a presentation that updates automatically as the underlying data changes.

Beyond the Quip Slides rollout, Quip also struck partnership deals with Box and Dropbox to insert files and folders directly into presentation slides or documents. And it will give reps using Sales Cloud Lightning or Service Cloud Lightning consoles to use Quip documents and spreadsheets directly in their workflows.

Slides will be available as part of the regular $10 per-user per-month Quip license or the $25 per-user per-month Enterprise license. The new features arrive just a week before Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual customer bash in downtown San Francisco.

[Editor’s Note: Salesforce is a GeekWire annual sponsor.]

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