Microsoft PowerPoint Test Microsoft PowerPoint Quiz Powerpoint at Amazon, click here! Dell.com Considered the best computer store on the Net! Compare Computer Stores Considered the best computer stores on the Net! About Microsoft PowerPoint Microsoft 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. 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. 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. 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. 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[ Tell a friend! Site search Web search
