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Whether it’s being polite, trying not to scare its competitor, or somehow believes this is true, Google has repeatedly claimed that it isn’t challenging the Microsoft Office Suite.  But now a feature within Gmail looks a lot like a presentation tool, and onlookers are having an even harder time accepting the search engine giant’s word.

A Spanish-speaking blogger who goes by the name “Dirson” appears to have been the first to catch the new feature.  Unfortunately, your humble author doesn’t speak much Spanish.  Google Blogoscoped’s Tony Ruscoe apparently does, however, and he writes “that some users, myself included, are seeing a ‘View as slideshow’ link in Gmail when receiving PowerPoint files.

“Clicking ‘View as slideshow’ opens a new window where you can view the slideshow using Google’s Flash-based player,” he continued.  Yet not every Gmail account has been blessed with this ability, and Ruscoe notes, “The embed code is still a little buggy - it currently lists ‘http://mail.google.comhttp://mail.google.com’ in the URL - and doesn’t even appear to be working yet.”

So, yeah, Google appears to be just testing this feature, or it may even be an accident that the feature was made available to (some of) the public.  And although the presentation tool may well be another weapon in the anti-Microsoft arsenal, Rafe Needleman wisely draws the line between a presentation tool and a true PowerPoint competitor.

“It’s not . . . what we’re all waiting for, which is the slideshow authoring tool that will presumably have cool collaborative features similar Google’s word processor and spreadsheet,” Needleman writes.  “Nor does this peek show us what Google is going to be doing in the world of screen sharing or remote presentations, an area that several startups have recently attacked.”

Still . . . for how much longer can Google say that it hasn’t set its sights on PowerPoint and the rest of Microsoft’s lineup?