Microsoft PowerPoint (Windows) Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 running on Microsoft Windows. Maintainer: Microsoft Latest release: 2003 / October 2003 OS: Microsoft Windows Use: Presentation License: Proprietary Website: www.microsoft.com Microsoft PowerPoint (Mac OS X) Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2004 running on Mac OS X v10.4. Maintainer: Microsoft Latest release: 2004 v10.2.4 / May 10, 2006 OS: Mac OS X Use: Presentation License: Proprietary Website: www.microsoft.com See Power point (disambiguation) for other uses of the term. Microsoft PowerPoint (full name Microsoft Office PowerPoint) is a ubiquitous presentation program developed for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS computer operating systems. Being widely used by businesspeople, educators, and trainers, it is among the most prevalent forms of persuasion technology: according to its vendor, Microsoft Corporation, some 30 million presentations are made with PowerPoint every day. Contents 1 Operation 2 History 3 Cultural effects 3.1 Criticism of PowerPoint 4 See also 5 External links 5.1 Discussion Groups 5.2 Articles Operation In Microsoft Office 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 usually) displayed on-screen and navigated through at the command of the presenter. Slides can also form the basis of webcasts. PowerPoint provides two types of movements. Emergence, 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. 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). History Microsoft PowerPoint 4.0 - 2003 Icons The idea for PowerPoint came from the mind of Bob Gaskins, a former Berkeley Ph.D. student who realized that the coming age of graphics interfaces could revolutionize the design and creation of presentation materials. In 1984, Gaskins joined a failing Silicon Valley software firm called Forethought and hired a software developer, Dennis Austin. Bob and Dennis refined the vision and designed "Presenter" to implement it. Dennis created the original version of the program with Tom Rudkin. Bob later suggested the new name "PowerPoint" which finally became the product name. Microsoft PowerPoint 4.0 PowerPoint 1.0 was released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh. It ran in black and white, generating text-and-graphics pages for overhead transparencies. The first color Macintoshes soon came to market, though, and a full color version of PowerPoint shipped a year after the original. The user manual with the first release was unique. It was a blue hardbound book that Forethought believed executives wouldn't mind having on their desks as in 1987 most executives didn't want to have anything to do with computers and computer manuals. Updating the manual proved to be expensive. The hardbound book manual was soon abandoned. Wikibooks has more about this subject: Powerpoint Later in 1987, Forethought and PowerPoint were purchased by Microsoft Corporation for $14 million. In 1990 the first Windows versions were produced. Since 1990, PowerPoint has been a standard part of the Microsoft Office suite of applications. The 2002 version, part of the Office XP Professional suite and also available as a stand-alone product, provides 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. The current version, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 does not differ much from the 2002/XP version. It enhances collaboration between co-workers and now has the feature "Package for CD", which makes it easy to burn presentations with multimedia content and the viewer on CD-ROM for distribution. The next version, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, which is already available in a beta version, will bring major changes of the user interface and enhanced graphic capabilities. Being part of Microsoft Office has allowed PowerPoint to become the world's most widely used presentation program. 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 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 cannot always successfully open its own files originating in the Windows version. This has led to a movement towards open standards, such as PDF and OASIS. 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 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 generally easier to produce presentations with (even to the point of having an "AutoContent Wizard" suggesting a structure for a presentation - named as a joke by the Microsoft engineers who added it in the 1990s), the difference in needs and desires of presenters and audiences has become more noticeable. Criticism of PowerPoint One major source of criticism of PowerPoint comes from Yale professor of statistics and graphic design Edward Tufte. In his essay The cognitive style of PowerPoint, Tufte criticizes many emergent properties of the software. Cliff Atkinson, a management consultant at Sociable Media, has written extensively about organizational issues related to PowerPoint, including interviews with experts from the fields of marketing, cognitive science, law, information design, and more. University of Toronto management professor David Beatty says: "PowerPoint is like a disease. It's the AIDS of management." He advises spending 85 percent of one's time on figuring out what to say, and only 15 percent on how. Peter Norvig created a PowerPoint version of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address as a tongue-in-cheek example of the presentation style often associated with PowerPoint. Norvig published his slides on his website[1] in 2000. It was subsequently picked up by several early blogs as well as the Wall Street Journal as an illustration of how a carefully crafted and successful speech can be turned into a disjointed set of garish slides, which even included gratuitous data plots. The use of PowerPoint presentations in the United States military in place of formal written orders was criticized by General David McKiernan who stated: "In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary order], or plan, you get a bunch of PowerPoint slides…[T]hat is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides."[2] This led legal scholar Marty Lederman to, perhaps jokingly, "be in favor of a constitutional amendment making PowerPoint presentations illegal."[3] The expression Death by PowerPoint has become popular for describing poor presentations. "Death by PowerPoint" does not necessarily mean that the presentation itself is boring; the problem could lie with the presenter. See also PowerPoint animation Beamer a LaTeX class for creating presentations. Impress, a program similar to PowerPoint Apple Keynote oNLine System File viewers HyperCard Worship presentation program External links Official website of PowerPoint at Microsoft flashgeek PowerPoint tutorials and community, especially in regards to using PowerPoint in combination with Macromedia Flash. PowerPoint Heaven — The Power to Animate Contains PowerPoint movies, showcases, PowerPoint games, animation templates and tutorials on creating animations for your PowerPoint Presentations. PowerPoint FAQ pages Compilation of Frequently Asked Questions in the Microsoft Office PowerPoint Discussion Groups. Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer 2003 Download (freeware, 1.7 MiB.) Free PowerPoint Viewer provided by Microsoft, supports presentations from PowerPoint 97 to 2003. Discussion Groups Microsoft Office PowerPoint Discussion Group Microsoft Office PowerPoint Yahoo! Group — Help and advice for users of PowerPoint Articles Atkinson, Cliff (2004). PowerPoint usability: Q&A with Don Norman. Retrieved on 2006-05-28. Parker, Ian (May 2001). "Absolute PowerPoint: The software that tells you what to think". The New Yorker (May 28, 2001): 76–87. Tufte, Edward R. [1997] (January 2002). “The decision to launch the space shuttle Challenger”, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, 5th rev. printing, Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphics Press, 38–53. ISBN 0-9613921-2-6. EServer TC Library: Presentations (2001–2006). Retrieved on 2006-05-28. Making a list, checking it twice: Interiew with Dean Eppler. Astrobiology Magazine (2005-10-13). Retrieved on 2006-05-28. (Astronauts using PowerPoint to replace paper checklists.) Rutledge, Patrice (2003). Creating Streaming Media Presentations with Microsoft Producer for Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003. Retrieved on 2006-09-13. Microsoft Office Access • Entourage • Excel • FrontPage • InfoPath • InterConnect • Live Meeting • MapPoint • OneNote • Outlook • PowerPoint • Project • Publisher • Student • Visio • Word Search Term: "Microsoft_PowerPoint" Categories: Mac OS software | Microsoft Office | Presentation software | Technical communication tools | Windows software

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