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March 10, , update for PowerPoint (KB)
PowerPoint became a component of the Microsoft Office suite, first offered in for Macintosh [10] and in for Windows , [11] which bundled several Microsoft apps. Beginning with PowerPoint 4. PowerPoint’s market share was very small at first, prior to introducing a version for Microsoft Windows, but grew rapidly with the growth of Windows and of Office.
PowerPoint was originally designed to provide visuals for group presentations within business organizations, but has come to be very widely used in many other communication situations, both in business and beyond. The first PowerPoint version Macintosh was used to produce overhead transparencies, [20] the second Macintosh , Windows could also produce color 35 mm slides.
Development from that spec was begun by Austin in November , for Macintosh first. Throughout this development period, the product was called “Presenter. Gaskins says that he thought of “PowerPoint”, based on the product’s goal of “empowering” individual presenters, and sent that name to the lawyers for clearance, while all the documentation was hastily revised.
Funding to complete development of PowerPoint was assured in mid-January, , when a new Apple Computer venture capital fund, called Apple’s Strategic Investment Group, [34] selected PowerPoint to be its first investment. PowerPoint 1. By early , Microsoft was starting to plan a new application to create presentations, an activity led by Jeff Raikes , who was head of marketing for the Applications Division. Raikes later recounted his reaction to seeing PowerPoint and his report about it to Bill Gates , who was initially skeptical: [37].
I thought, “software to do overheads—that’s a great idea. I said, “Bill, I think we really ought to do this;” and Bill said, “No, no, no, no, no, that’s just a feature of Microsoft Word, just put it into Word. And I kept saying, “Bill, no, it’s not just a feature of Microsoft Word, it’s a whole genre of how people do these presentations.
When PowerPoint was released by Forethought, its initial press was favorable; the Wall Street Journal reported on early reactions: ” ‘I see about one product a year I get this excited about,’ says Amy Wohl, a consultant in Bala Cynwyd, Pa. On April 28, , a week after shipment, a group of Microsoft’s senior executives spent another day at Forethought to hear about initial PowerPoint sales on Macintosh and plans for Windows.
The New York Times reported: [43]. Forethought makes a program called PowerPoint that allows users of Apple Macintosh computers to make overhead transparencies or flip charts. Forethought would remain in Sunnyvale, giving Microsoft a Silicon Valley presence.
The unit will be headed by Robert Gaskins, Forethought’s vice president of product development. Microsoft’s president Jon Shirley offered Microsoft’s motivation for the acquisition: ” ‘We made this deal primarily because of our belief in desktop presentations as a product category.
Forethought was first to market with a product in this category. Microsoft set up within its Applications Division an independent “Graphics Business Unit” to develop and market PowerPoint, the first Microsoft application group distant from the main Redmond location. A new PowerPoint 2. PowerPoint 3. This was at first an alternative to overhead transparencies and 35 mm slides, but over time would come to replace them. PowerPoint had been included in Microsoft Office from the beginning.
PowerPoint 2. A plan to integrate the applications themselves more tightly had been indicated as early as February , toward the end of PowerPoint 3. Another important question is what portion of our applications sales over time will be a set of applications versus a single product.
Please assume that we stay ahead in integrating our family together in evaluating our future strategies—the product teams WILL deliver on this. The move from bundling separate products to integrated development began with PowerPoint 4.
When it was released, the computer press reported on the change approvingly: “PowerPoint 4. The integration is so good, you’ll have to look twice to make sure you’re running PowerPoint and not Word or Excel. Although PowerPoint by this point had become part of the integrated Microsoft Office product, its development remained in Silicon Valley.
Succeeding versions of PowerPoint introduced important changes, particularly version Since then major development of PowerPoint as part of Office has continued. New development techniques shared across Office for PowerPoint have made it possible to ship versions of PowerPoint for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and web access nearly simultaneously, [ citation needed ] and to release new features on an almost monthly schedule. In , Jeff Raikes, who had most recently been President of the Business Division of Microsoft including responsibility for Office , [63] observed: “of course, today we know that PowerPoint is oftentimes the number two—or in some cases even the number one—most-used tool” among the applications in Office.
PowerPoint’s initial sales were about 40, copies sold in nine months , about 85, copies in , and about , copies in , all for Macintosh. Jeff Raikes, who had bought PowerPoint for Microsoft, later recalled: “By , it looked like it wasn’t a very smart idea [for Microsoft to have acquired PowerPoint], because not very many people were using PowerPoint.
This began to change when the first version for Windows, PowerPoint 2. Sales of PowerPoint 3. By PowerPoint sales had doubled again, to more than 4 million copies annually, representing 85 percent of the world market. Since the late s, PowerPoint’s market share of total world presentation software has been estimated at 95 percent by both industry and academic sources.
The earliest version of PowerPoint for Macintosh could be used to print black and white pages to be photocopied onto sheets of transparent film for projection from overhead projectors , and to print speaker’s notes and audience handouts; the next version for Macintosh, for Windows was extended to also produce color 35mm slides by communicating a file over a modem to a Genigraphics imaging center with slides returned by overnight delivery for projection from slide projectors.
PowerPoint was used for planning and preparing a presentation, but not for delivering it apart from previewing it on a computer screen, or distributing printed paper copies. Robert Gaskins, one of the creators of PowerPoint, says he publicly demonstrated that use for the first time at a large Microsoft meeting held in Paris on February 25, , by using an unreleased development build of PowerPoint 3. By about , ten years later, digital projection had become the dominant mode of use, replacing transparencies and 35mm slides and their projectors.
Although the PowerPoint software had been used to generate transparencies for over a decade, this usage was not typically encompassed by a common understanding of the term. In contemporary operation, PowerPoint is used to create a file called a “presentation” or “deck” containing a sequence of pages called “slides” in the app which usually have a consistent style from template masters , and which may contain information imported from other apps or created in PowerPoint, including text, bullet lists, tables, charts, drawn shapes, images, audio clips, video clips, animations of elements, and animated transitions between slides, plus attached notes for each slide.
After such a file is created, typical operation is to present it as a slide show using a portable computer, where the presentation file is stored on the computer or available from a network, and the computer’s screen shows a “presenter view” with current slide, next slide, speaker’s notes for the current slide, and other information.
A smartphone remote control built in to PowerPoint for iOS optionally controlled from Apple Watch [82] and for Android [83] allows the presenter to control the show from elsewhere in the room. In addition to a computer slide show projected to a live audience by a speaker, PowerPoint can be used to deliver a presentation in a number of other ways:.
The standard form of such presentations involves a single person standing before a group of people, talking and using the PowerPoint slideshow to project visual aids onto a screen. In practice, however, presentations are not always delivered in this mode.
In our studies, we often found that the presenter sat at a table with a small group of people and walked them through a “deck”, composed of paper copies of the slides.
In some cases, decks were simply distributed to individuals, without even a walk-through or discussion. Other variations in the form included sending the PowerPoint file electronically to another site and talking through the slides over an audio or video channel e. Another common variation was placing a PowerPoint file on a web site for people to view at different times. They found that some of these ways of using PowerPoint could influence the content of presentations, for example when “the slides themselves have to carry more of the substance of the presentation, and thus need considerably more content than they would have if they were intended for projection by a speaker who would orally provide additional details and nuance about content and context.
PowerPoint Mobile is included with Windows Mobile 5. It is a presentation program capable of reading and editing Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, although authoring abilities are limited to adding notes, editing text, and rearranging slides.
It can’t create new presentations. In this version of PowerPoint users can create and edit new presentations, present, and share their PowerPoint documents.
PowerPoint for the web is a free lightweight version of Microsoft PowerPoint available as part of Office on the web, which also includes web versions of Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word. PowerPoint for the web does not support inserting or editing charts, equations, or audio or video stored on your PC, but they are all displayed in the presentation if they were added in using a desktop app.
Some elements, like WordArt effects or more advanced animations and transitions, are not displayed at all, although they are preserved in the document. PowerPoint for the web also lacks the Outline, Master, Slide Sorter, and Presenter views present in the desktop app, as well as having limited printing options. PowerPoint was originally targeted just for business presentations. Robert Gaskins, who was responsible for its design, has written about his intended customers: ” I did not target other existing large groups of users of presentations, such as school teachers or military officers.
I also did not plan to target people who were not existing users of presentations Our focus was purely on business users, in small and large companies, from one person to the largest multinationals.
PowerPoint use in business grew over its first five years to sales of about 1 million copies annually, for worldwide market share of 63 percent. Not everyone immediately approved of the greater use of PowerPoint for presentations, even in business.
At the same time that PowerPoint was becoming dominant in business settings, it was also being adopted for uses beyond business: “Personal computing The result has been the rise of presentation culture. In an information society, nearly everyone presents. In , at about the same time that Gold was pronouncing PowerPoint’s ubiquity in business, the influential Bell Labs engineer Robert W. Lucky could already write about broader uses: [].
A new language is in the air, and it is codified in PowerPoint. In a family discussion about what to do on a given evening, for example, I feel like pulling out my laptop and giving a Vugraph presentation In church, I am surprised that the preachers haven’t caught on yet. How have we gotten on so long without PowerPoint?
Over a decade or so, beginning in the mid s, PowerPoint began to be used in many communication situations, well beyond its original business presentation uses, to include teaching in schools [] and in universities, [] lecturing in scientific meetings [] and preparing their related poster sessions [] , worshipping in churches, [] making legal arguments in courtrooms, [] displaying supertitles in theaters, [] driving helmet-mounted displays in spacesuits for NASA astronauts, [] giving military briefings, [] issuing governmental reports, [] undertaking diplomatic negotiations, [] [] writing novels, [] giving architectural demonstrations, [] prototyping website designs, [] creating animated video games, [] creating art projects, [] and even as a substitute for writing engineering technical reports, [] and as an organizing tool for writing general business documents.
By , it seemed that PowerPoint was being used everywhere. Julia Keller reported for the Chicago Tribune : []. In less than a decade, it has revolutionized the worlds of business, education, science, and communications, swiftly becoming the standard for just about anybody who wants to explain just about anything to just about anybody else. From corporate middle managers reporting on production goals to 4th-graders fashioning a show-and-tell on the French and Indian War to church pastors explicating the seven deadly sins PowerPoint seems poised for world domination.
As uses broadened, cultural awareness of PowerPoint grew and commentary about it began to appear. Out of all the analyses of PowerPoint over a quarter of a century, at least three general themes emerged as categories of reaction to its broader use: 1 “Use it less”: avoid PowerPoint in favor of alternatives, such as using more-complex graphics and written prose, or using nothing; [17] 2 “Use it differently”: make a major change to a PowerPoint style that is simpler and pictorial, turning the presentation toward a performance, more like a Steve Jobs keynote; [18] and 3 “Use it better”: retain much of the conventional PowerPoint style but learn to avoid making many kinds of mistakes that can interfere with communication.
An early reaction was that the broader use of PowerPoint was a mistake, and should be reversed. An influential example of this came from Edward Tufte , an authority on information design, who has been a professor of political science, statistics, and computer science at Princeton and Yale, but is best known for his self-published books on data visualization, which have sold nearly 2 million copies as of In , he published a widely-read booklet titled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, revised in PowerPoint’s convenience for some presenters is costly to the content and the audience.
These costs arise from the cognitive style characteristics of the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, an intensely hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narratives and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous chartjunk and PP Phluff, branding of slides with logotypes, a preoccupation with format not content, incompetent designs for data graphics and tables, and a smirky commercialism that turns information into a sales pitch and presenters into marketeers [italics in original].
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What’s new in Microsoft Office In Office , you’ll find new inking tools, data types, functions, translation and editing tools, motion graphics, ease-of-use features, and so much more! Read the full changelog. Text editor, spreadsheet tool, email client, presentation maker, and note taker in one suite Installing Microsoft Office might seem a little tricky, since there are a lot of tools bundled into the installation kit, so computer knowledge can come in handy when trying to deploy a fresh copy of the software.
Complex features and multiple tools to use However, upon further analysis, one can find components or functions with every mouse click, and this might seem confusing if users do not know exactly the tool they require. Conclusion and performance All the functions of Microsoft Office can be tested through the day trial period, and if the results are satisfactory, a license needs to be purchased.
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