MS POWERPOINT:
Microsoft PowerPoint is a proprietary commercial presentation programdeveloped 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.

History[edit]

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.^[2] In 1987, it was renamed to "PowerPoint" due to problems with trademarks, the idea for the name coming from Robert Gaskins.^[3] In August of the same year, Forethought was bought by Microsoft for $14 million USD ($28.8 million in present-day terms^[4]), 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 introduced many new changes with the release of 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.^[5]

As of 2012, various versions of PowerPoint claim ~95% of the presentation software market share, with installations on at least 1 billion computers. Among presenters world-wide, this program is used at an estimated frequency of 350 times per second.^[6]

Operation[edit]

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. 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.

PowerPoint provides numerous features that offer flexibility and the ability to create a professional presentation. One of the features provides the ability to create a presentation that includes music which plays throughout the entire presentation or sound effects for particular slides. In addition to the ability to add sound files, the presentation can be designed to run, like a movie, on its own. PowerPoint allows the user to record the slide show with narration and a laser pointer. The user may customize slide shows to show the slides in a different order than originally designed and to have slides appear multiple times. Microsoft also offers the ability to broadcast the presentation to specific users via a link and Windows Live.