Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Microsoft Office system. Microsoft PowerPoint runs on Microsoft Windows and the Mac OS computer operating systems.

It is widely used by business people, educators, students, and trainers and is among the most prevalent forms of persuasion technology. Beginning with Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft revised branding to emphasize PowerPoint's identity as a component within the office suite. Microsoft began calling it Microsoft Office PowerPoint instead of merely Microsoft PowerPoint. The present version is Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007. As a part of the Microsoft Office suite, PowerPoint has become the world's most widely used presentation program.

History

Microsoft Office PowerPoint originally was developed by Bob Gaskin and software developer Dennis Austin under the name Presenter for Forethought.

Forethought released PowerPoint 1.0 in April 1987 for the Apple Macintosh. It ran in black and white, generating text-and-graphics pages for overhead transparencies. A new full color version of PowerPoint shipped a year later after the first color Macintosh came to market.

Microsoft Corporation purchased Forethought and its PowerPoint software product for $14 million on July 31, 1987. In 1990 the first Windows versions were produced for Windows 3.0. Since 1990, PowerPoint is included in Microsoft Office suite of applications -- except for the Basic Editions of the suite.

The 2002 version, part of the Microsoft Office XP suite and also available as a stand-alone product, provided features such as comparing and merging changes in presentations, the ability to define animation paths for individual shapes, pyramid/radial/target and Venn diagrams, multiple slide masters, a "task pane" to view and select text and objects on the clipboard, password protection for presentations, automatic "photo album" generation, and the use of "smart tags" allowing people to quickly select the format of text copied into the presentation.

Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 did not differ much from the 2002/XP version. It enhanced collaboration between co-workers and featured "Package for CD", which makes it easy to burn presentations with multimedia content and the viewer on CD-ROM for distribution. It also improved support for graphics and multimedia.

The present version, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, released in November 2006, brought major changes of the user interface and enhanced graphic capabilities.

Operation

In PowerPoint, as in most other presentation software, text, graphics, movies, and other objects are positioned on individual pages or "slides". The "slide" analogy is a reference to the slide projector, a device which has become somewhat obsolete due to the use of PowerPoint and other presentation software. Slides can be printed, or (more often) displayed on-screen and navigated through at the command of the presenter. Slides can also form the basis of webcasts.

PowerPoint provides three types of movements. Entrance, emphasis, and exit of elements on a slide itself are controlled by what PowerPoint calls Custom Animations. Transitions, on the other hand are movements between slides. These can be animated in a variety of ways.Custom animation can be used to create small story boards by animating pictures to enter, exit or move. with callouts, speech bubbles with edited text can be sent on and off to create speech. The overall design of a presentation can be controlled with a master slide; and the overall structure, extending to the text on each slide, can be edited using a primitive outliner. Presentations can be saved and run in any of the file formats: the default .ppt (presentation), .pps (PowerPoint Show) or .pot (template). In PowerPoint 2007 and Mac OS X 2008 versions, the XML-based file formats .pptx, .ppsx and .potx have been introduced.Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 running under Windows XPMicrosoft PowerPoint 2000 running under Windows 2000The about box for PowerPoint 1.0, with an empty document in the background.

Compatibility

As Microsoft Office files are often sent from one computer user to another, arguably the most important feature of any presentation software - such as Apple's Keynote, or OpenOffice.org Impress - has become the ability to open Microsoft Office PowerPoint files. However, because of PowerPoint's ability to embed content from other applications through OLE, some kinds of presentations become highly tied to the Windows platform, meaning that even PowerPoint on Mac OS X can't always successfully open its own files originating in the Windows version.

Cultural effects

Supporters and critics typically agree that the ease of use of presentation software can save a lot of time for people who otherwise would have used other types of visual aid - hand-drawn or mechanically typeset slides, blackboards or whiteboards, or overhead projections. Ease of use also encourages those who otherwise would not have used visual aids, or would not have given a presentation at all, to make presentations. As PowerPoint's style, animation, and multimedia abilities have become more sophisticated, and as PowerPoint has become typically easier to produce presentations with (even to the point of having an "AutoContent Wizard" suggesting a structure for a presentation - initially started as a joke by the Microsoft engineers but later included as a serious feature in the 1990s), the difference in needs and desires of presenters and audiences has become more noticeable.

Criticism

One major source of criticism of PowerPoint comes from Yale University professor emeritus of statistics and graphic design Edward Tufte, who criticizes many emergent properties of the software:

It is used to guide and reassure a presenter, instead of to enlighten the audience;

Unhelpfully simplistic tables and charts, resulting from the low resolution of computer displays;

The outliner causing ideas to be arranged in an unnecessarily deep hierarchy, itself subverted by the need to restate the hierarchy on each slide;

Enforcement of the audience's linear progression through that hierarchy (whereas with handouts, readers could browse and relate items at their leisure);

Poor typography and chart layout, from presenters who are poor designers and who use poorly designed templates and default settings;

Simplistic thinking, from ideas being squashed into bulleted lists, and stories with beginning, middle, and end being turned into a collection of disparate, loosely disguised points. This may present a kind of image of objectivity and neutrality that people associate with science, technology, and "bullet points".

Every slideshow made typically ends up looking like everybody elses due to the provided templates for slideshows.

Tufte's criticism of the use of PowerPoint has extended to its use by NASA engineers in the events leading to the Columbia disaster. Tufte's analysis of a representative NASA PowerPoint slide is included in a full page sidebar entitled "Engineering by Viewgraphs" in Volume 1 of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's report.

Versions

Versions for the Mac OS include:

1987 PowerPoint 1.0 for Mac OS classic

1988 PowerPoint 2.0 for Mac OS classic

1992 PowerPoint 3.0 for Mac OS classic

1994 PowerPoint 4.0 for Mac OS classic

1998 PowerPoint 98 (8.0) for Mac OS classic (Office 1998 for mac)

2000 PowerPoint 2001 (9.0) for Mac OS X (Office 2001 for mac)

2002 PowerPoint v. X (10.0) for Mac OS X (Office:mac v. X)

2004 PowerPoint 2004 (11.0) for Mac OS X (Office:mac 2004)

2008 PowerPoint 2008 (12.0) for Mac OS X Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac

Note: There are no PowerPoint 5.0 , 6.0 or 7.0 for Mac. There are no version 5.0 or 6.0 because the Windows 95 version was launched with Word 7. All of the Office 95 products have OLE 2 capacity - moving data automatically from various programs - and PowerPoint 7 shows that it was contemporary with Word 7. There was no version 7.0 made for mac to coincide with either version 7.0 for windows or PowerPoint 97...Microsoft PowerPoint 4.0 - 2007 Icons (Windows versions)

Versions for Microsoft Windows include:

1990 PowerPoint 2.0 for Windows 3.0

1992 PowerPoint 3.0 for Windows 3.1

1993 PowerPoint 4.0 (Office 4.x)

1995 PowerPoint for Windows 95 (version 7.0) - (Office 95)

1997 PowerPoint 97 - (Office '97)

1999 PowerPoint 2000 (version 9.0) - (Office 2000)

2001 PowerPoint 2002 (version 10) - (Office XP)

2003 PowerPoint 2003 (version 11) - (Office 2003)

2006-2007 PowerPoint 2007 (version 12) - (Office 2007)

Note: There are no PowerPoint version 5.0 or 6.0, because the Windows 95 version was launched with Word 7.0. All Office 95 products have OLE 2 capacity - moving data automatically from various programs - and PowerPoint 7.0 shows that it was contemporary with Word 7.0.

File formats

The binary format specification has been available from Microsoft on request but since February 2008 the .PPT format specification can be freely downloaded and implemented under the open specification promise patent licensing.

In Microsoft Office 2007 the binary file formats were replaced as the default format by the new XML based Office Open XML formats, which are published as an open standard.