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. The Windows version can run in Linux operating system, under the Wine compatibility layer.

PowerPoint is widely used by business people, educators, students, and trainers and is among the most prevalent forms of persuasive 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 versions are Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 for Windows and 2008 for Mac.

History

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

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. 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.

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.