Microsoft PowerPoint

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"Power point" redirects here. For other uses, see Power point (disambiguation).
Microsoft Office PowerPoint (Windows)
Microsoft Office PowerPoint Logo

Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 in Windows Vista.
Developed by Microsoft
Latest release 12.0.6211.1000 (2007 SP1) / December 11, 2007
OS Microsoft Windows
Genre Presentation
License Proprietary
Website Microsoft Office PowerPoint
Microsoft PowerPoint (Mac OS X)

Microsoft PowerPoint:Mac 2008 running on Mac OS X 10.5.
Developed by Microsoft
Latest release 12.0.0 (2008) / January 15, 2008
OS Mac OS X
Genre Presentation
License Proprietary
Website Microsoft PowerPoint: Mac 2008

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

PowerPoint 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 the branding to emphasize PowerPoint's place within the office suite, calling it Microsoft Office PowerPoint instead of just 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.

Contents

[edit] History

Microsoft Office PowerPoint was originally developed by Bob Gaskin and software developer Dennis Austin under the name Presenter for Forethought.[1]

Forethought released PowerPoint 1.0 for the Apple Macintosh in April 1987. 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.[2] In 1990 the first Windows versions were produced for Windows 3.0. Since 1990, PowerPoint has been 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 current version, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, released in November 2006, brought major changes of the user interface and enhanced graphic capabilities. [3]

[edit] Operation

PowerPoint presentations consist a number of individual pages or "slides". The "slide" analogy is a reference to the slide projector, a device that 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:

  1. Entrance, emphasis, and exit of elements on a slide itself are controlled by what PowerPoint calls Custom Animations
  2. Transitions, on the other hand are movements between slides. These can be animated in a variety of ways
  3. 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, along with the macro-enabled file formats .pptm, .potm, .ppsm.

Office PowerPoint 2003
Office PowerPoint 2003
Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 running under Windows 2000
Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 running under Windows 2000
The about box for PowerPoint 1.0, with an empty document in the background.
The about box for PowerPoint 1.0, with an empty document in the background.

[edit] 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 cannot always successfully open its own files originating in the Windows version.

[edit] Cultural effects

Supporters and critics generally agree[4][5][6] 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 the application has generally made it easier to produce presentations (even to the point of having an "AutoContent Wizard" suggesting a structure for a presentation—started as a joke by the Microsoft engineers[citation needed] but later included as a serious feature in the 1990s), the difference in needs and desires of presenters and audiences has become more noticeable.

[edit] Versions

Versions for the Mac OS include:

Note: There is no PowerPoint 5.0, 6.0 or 7.0 for Mac. There is 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.[7].[8].

Microsoft PowerPoint 4.0 - 2007 Icons (Windows versions)
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 is 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.

[edit] 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. [9]

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.

[edit] See also

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[edit] References

  1. ^ Absolute Powerpoint by Ian Parker
  2. ^ "COMPANY NEWS; Microsoft Buys Software Unit", New York Times, July 31, 1987. Retrieved on 2006-12-02. 
  3. ^ http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/HA100742261033.aspx
  4. ^ PowerPoint Presentations: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
  5. ^ Essay
  6. ^ The Technology Source Archives - The Use of PowerPoint in Teaching Comparative Politics
  7. ^ PowerPoint Tips
  8. ^ Microsoft for Mac Products - Do More on Your Mac | Mactopia
  9. ^ Microsoft Office Powerpoint 97 - 2007 Binary File Format Specification (*.ppt). Microsoft Corporation (2007).

[edit] External links

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