Microsoft PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint

Microsoft Office 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. It is a component of the Microsoft Office system.

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. Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 did 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. It also improved support for graphics and multimedia. The current version, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, released in November 2006, brought major changes of the user interface and enhanced graphic capabilities. Being part of Microsoft Office has allowed PowerPoint to become the world's most widely used presentation program. As Microsoft Office files are often sent from one computer user to another, arguably the most important feature of any presentation software — such as Apple's Keynote, or OpenOffice.org Impress — has become the ability to open PowerPoint files. However, because of PowerPoint's ability to embed content from other applications through OLE, some kinds of presentations become highly tied to the Windows platform, meaning that even PowerPoint on Mac OS cannot always successfully open its own files originating in the Windows version. This has led to a movement towards open standards, such as PDF and OASIS OpenDocument.