power point

 

Microsoft PowerPoint is the name of a proprietary commercial software presentation program developed by Microsoft. It was officially launched on May 22, 1990 as a part of the Microsoft Office suite, and runs on Microsoft Windows and Apple's Mac OS X operating system. The current versions are Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2010 for Windows and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

History

Originally designed for the Macintosh computer, the initial release was called "Presenter", developed by Dennis Austin^{[not in citation given]} and Thomas Rudkin^{[not in citation given]} of Forethought, Inc.^[1] In 1987, it was renamed to "PowerPoint" due to problems with trademarks, the idea for the name coming from Robert Gaskins.^[2] In August of the same year, Forethought was bought by Microsoft for $14 million USD ($28.6 million in present-day terms^[3]), and became Microsoft's Graphics Business Unit, which continued to develop the software further. PowerPoint was officially launched on May 22, 1990, the same day that Microsoft released Windows 3.0.

PowerPoint changed significantly with PowerPoint 97. Prior to PowerPoint 97, presentations were linear, always proceeding from one slide to the next. PowerPoint 97 incorporated the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) language, underlying all macro generation in Office 97, which allowed users to invoke pre-defined transitions and effects in a non-linear movie-like style without having to learn programming.

PowerPoint 2000 (and the rest of the Office 2000 suite) introduced a clipboard that could hold multiple objects at once. Another change was that the Office Assistant was changed to be less intrusive.^[4]

As of 2012^[update], various versions of PowerPoint claim ~95% of the presentation software market share, having been installed on at least 1 billion computers; the frequency of use in presentations had been estimated at around 350 per second globally.^[5]

See also: Microsoft Office 2000

Operation

PowerPoint presentations consist of a number of individual pages or "slides". The "slide" analogy is a reference to the slide projector. A better analogy would be the "foils" (or transparencies/plastic sheets) that are shown with an overhead projector, although they are in decline now. Slides may contain text, graphics, sound, movies, and other objects, which may be arranged freely. The presentation can be printed, displayed live on a computer, or 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.   Cultural impact

3.      A PowerPoint presentation in progress.

4.      Supporters say that^[6][7][8] the ease of use of presentation software can save a

5.     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" (discontinued in PowerPoint 2007) suggesting a structure for a presentation), the difference in needs and desires of presenters and audiences has become more noticeable.

The benefit of PowerPoint is continually debated, though most people believe that the benefit may be to present structural presentations to business workers, such as Raytheon Elcan does.^[9] Its use in classroom lectures has influenced investigations of PowerPoint’s effects on student performance in comparison to lectures based on overhead projectors, traditional lectures, and online lectures. Not only is it a useful tool for introductory lectures, but it also has many functions that allow for review games, especially in the younger grades. There are no compelling results to prove or disprove that PowerPoint is more effective for learner retention than traditional presentation methods.^[10] The effect on audiences of poor PowerPoint presentations has been described as PowerPoint hell.

animated in a variety of ways.

Custom animation can be used to create small story boards by animating pictures to enter, exit or m.

 

from:  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PowerPoint