| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
In PowerPoint, as in most other presentation software, text, graphics, movies, and other objects are positioned on individual pages or "slides". Slides can be printed, or (more usually) displayed on-screen and navigated through at the command of the presenter. Transitions between slides can be animated in a variety of ways, as can the emergence of elements on a slide itself. The overall design of a presentation can be controlled with a master slide; and the overall structure, extending to the text on each slide, can be edited using a primitive outliner.
PowerPoint was originally developed by Bob Gaskins, a former Berkeley Ph.D. student who envisioned an easy-to-use presentation program that would manipulate a string of slides. In 1984, Gaskins joined a failing Silicon Valley software firm called Forethought and hired a software developer, Dennis Austin. Their prototype program was called "Presenter", but was changed to PowerPoint to avoid a trademark problem.
PowerPoint 1.0 was released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh. It ran in black and white, generating text-and-graphics pages that a photocopier could turn into overhead transparencies.
Later in 1987, Forethought and PowerPoint were purchased by Microsoft Corporation for $14 million. In 1988 the first Windows and DOS versions were produced. PowerPoint has since been a standard part of the Microsoft Office suite of applications.
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, passwordFor information on the game Password see Password game. A password is a form of authentication which uses secret data to control access to a resource. The password is kept secret from those not allowed access, and those wishing to gain access are tested o 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.
Being part of Microsoft Office has allowed PowerPoint to become the world's most widely used presentation program, even if not the best one. 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 KeynoteKeynote is a presentation software application made by Apple Computer for their Mac OS X operating system. Apple sells Keynote for $99 before tax. Keynote is also the name of a tree-based text editor, produced by , similar or based on the Tree text (like, or OpenOffice.orgOpenOffice. org OOo (the ". org" inclusion is due to a trademark dispute) is an office applications suite. It is intended to be compatible, and directly compete, with Microsoft Office. OOo is free software under the LGPL or SISSL and is available for Micr Impress -- has become the ability to open PowerPoint files.