Everything about Microsoft Powerpoint totally explained
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 current 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 didn't 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 current version,
Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, released in
November 2006, brought major changes of the
user interface and enhanced graphic capabilities.
Operation
PowerPoint presentations consist a number of 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 may contain text, graphics, movies, and other objects, which may be arranged freely on the slide. PowerPoint however facilitates the use of a consistent style in a presentation using a template or "Slide Master".
The presentation can be printed or displayed live on a computer and navigated through at the command of the presenter. For larger audiences the computer display is often projected using a
video projector. 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.
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 generally 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 wouldn't have used visual aids, or wouldn't 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 generally 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.
Versions
Versions for the
Mac OS include:
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...
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.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Microsoft Powerpoint'.
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