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GMail now has an inbuilt PPT viewer that lets you view Powerpoint attachment as a Flash picture slideshow in the web browser itself without requiring Microsoft PowerPoint application.

This slideshow feature of GMail will be useful since you no longer have to download the full PPT attachment in order to view that 16th slide of the presentation.

Here are two additional situations where it may help:

1. If you have to view a presentation on some computer that has no copy of PowerPoint, gmail yourself the PPT file and watch the slides inside the web browser.

2. GMail converts every slide of your Powerpoint presentation to a Flash (swf) file - if you manually advance the entire PPT slideshow using the arrows, all the slides will become available as Flash files in your browser's temp folder.

Just a quick way of transforming Powerpoint slides into SWF documents without using any desktop conversion software. The swf files may then be embedded in your blog for sharing with readers. Nothing great since Scribd can also convert your PPT to Flash paper.

Do you know if GMail Powerpoint viewer can read PPS (Powerpoint Show) formats.

View or Search Your Web Browser History in a Picture Timeline

Thumbstrips is a wonderful Firefox extension that helps you view recently visited web pages in a visual manner - it's a more user friendly and powerful approach than the native Firefox History view (Ctrl+H).

Thumbstrips, like an automatic screen capture program, takes screenshots of the websites that you are visiting and also records other details like how long you stayed on that web page and the number of times you viewed that page in your current session.

With recording turned on, press F2 and the website thumbnail images will display as a filmstrip in chronological order - move your cursor over the thumbnails to browse through your web history or right click any image to get more details about your interaction with that particular webpage.

Since thumbstrips will also save the associated HTML source code of web pages, you can use it for searching the browser history with keywords that may be in the title, URL or body of the webpage. The thumbnail images can also be saved to a local folder or shared with friends.