About MS Power Point
Microsoft Power Point is a popular presentation program that was developed to be used with the Windows operating system. However, it is also popular on Mac OS as well. It is a highly respected software program that is used by a large number of people. It can commonly be found in college classrooms as well as business organizations. MS Power Point falls under the category of persuasion technology. A number of studies have shown that well over 29 million presentations are made each day with MS Power Point. When Power Point is used, a number of documents can be displayed on what are called slides.
Some of the documents that can be presented on Power Point presentations are text, graphics, software programs, and even movies. The slides are presented in a way that is similar to a slide projector. In fact, it is software programs such as Power Point that made slide projectors extinct. The slides can be presented on a large screen, and they can be controlled by the person who is performing the presentation. It is software programs like Power Point that have laid the foundation for things such as webcasts. There are two types of movements that are offered by Power Point, and these are emphasis and emergence.
Custom animation is another powerful feature of Power Point. A movement that occurs between slides is referred to as being a "transition." The transitions can be designed to occur in a number of different ways. The primary tool that is used to control the slides is called the master slide. The structure of the presentation can be altered by the use of an outliner. Once a presentation has been created, it can be stored and run in a wide variety of different formats. Some of these formats are .pps, .ppt, and .pot. The concept for Power Point was first introduced in 1984 by Bob Gaskins, a college student who discovered that the introduction of the Information Age would allow information to produced in a graphical manner.
Gaskins became a member of Forethought, a Silicon Valley based company that was having a tremendous amount of financial problems. He quickly hired a programmer to design a program that was called the Presenter. However, the name Presenter would soon be changed to Power Point. The very first version of Power Point was introduced in 1987. It was specifically designed to be used on the Macintosh platform. A powerful manual was released for the software, and this made Power Point easy to learn. However, making updates to the manual turned out to be an expensive process.
Microsoft was quickly able to see the benefit of presentation programs such as Power Point. Instead of trying to develop and release a rival software that could compete with it, Microsoft made the decision to buy all the rights to the software. They made an offer to Forethought, and the software was acquired by Microsoft in 1987 for a price of $14 million. A few years later, the very first Windows versions of Power Point were released, and it is now one of the software programs to be placed in the Microsoft Office package.
