The History of PowerPoint Presentation

PowerPoint is commonly used by instructors, students, business people and educationalist. It is also one of the most established methods of persuasion technology. Microsoft revised the branding of PowerPoint into Microsoft Office PowerPoint and as an included component in its Microsoft Office suite. Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 is the current version of Microsoft Office PowerPoint. Today, The Microsoft Office PowerPoint as part of the Microsoft Office suite is still one of the most commonly used presentation application in the world.

The Past, the Present and the Future of PowerPoint

Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin (software developer) created the original PowerPoint application under the Forethought, Inc. it was originally called the Presenter.

The Presenter was then later called PowerPoint 1.0 when it was released for use for Apple Macintosh in April of 1987. During that time the PowerPoint 1.0 only function in black and white, and text and graphics generated pages only for overhead transparencies. The PowerPoint full color version came out the following year right after the first ever colored Macintosh became available in the market.

On July 31st of the year 1987, the Forethought Inc. and its PowerPoint product software was bought by Microsoft Corporation in a staggering amount of Fourteen Million dollars ($14 million). In the year 1990 the first ever version of Windows was created for Windows 3.0 and it has included the PowerPoint application as part of the Microsoft Office suite (Basic Editions Suite not included).

The 2002 PowerPoint version (available also as standalone product) and a part of the Microsoft Office XP suite, include features such as merging and comparing changes in presentations, Venn diagrams, pyramid, radial and target, the capacity to define animation paths for different shapes, task pane to select and view objects and texts on the clipboard, it has multiple slide masters, a photo album that is automatically generated, presentations that are protected by password, and smart tags that can be used to swiftly select a text format that is copied into the presentation.

The 2003 version of the Microsoft Office PowerPoint is not different from that of the former 2002 version of the Microsoft Office XP. It improved the collaboration of co-workers in terms of presentation and it also featured a "Package for CD", which allows simple and easy burning of presentations with multimedia contents and also the viewer for CD-ROM for dissemination. It also enhanced the multimedia and graphics support.

The 2007 Microsoft Office PowerPoint is the latest version, and was released in November of 2006. Major changes and enhancements on the graphic capabilities and user interface were done.

The Past, the Present and the Future of Presentation

Forty years ago, before the dawn of the computer age, presentations where done by mere talking to a room full of people hoping that they understand whatever it is that your saying. Then again, only colleagues in the same department held these presentation meetings, simply because they understand each other. In the event that other departments must attend these presentation meetings, a manager normally makes an appearance just so he can bridge the gap of comprehension to the rest of the company.

Then overhead projections, mechanically and/or hand-drawn typeset slides, blackboard, whiteboard and flipcharts came as presentation tools. It is effective, but people complained that it is very time consuming and tiring, but then again somebody has to do it. For years this has become the way presentations are done, which were actually effective.

Forty years later, we now have PowerPoint presentation application to aid us is creating a presentation that contains valuable information about the topic that we will discuss, and what is best about it is that it is visually interactive. Meetings are never complete without PowerPoint, it's like attending one without your pants on!

Now, people are still complaining, because, since PowerPoint make presentation making so easy, the content are disregarded, simply because people are spending hours trying to decide which color, font, background and clip arts to use.

In the end, we should all focus on the very topic that needs to be discussed. PowerPoint presentation should only help us create a visually passable presentation. It should not dictate how people will view your presentation as a whole.

< Back To Presentation Next Previous