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What is Microsoft PowerPoint?

WHAT IS MICROSOFT POWERPOINT?

Microsoft PowerPoint is a powerful presentation software developed by Microsoft. It is probably the most popular tool for creating presentations, and is used worldwide by businesses large and small.

Microsoft PowerPoint It is a standard component of the company's Microsoft Office suite software and is included along with Word, Excel, and other Office productivity tools, which has helped its popularity.

Microsoft PowerPoint uses slides to convey information with multimedia elements. This program is used to create complex business presentations, simple educational outlines, and much more.

The history of Microsoft PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint was developed by Dennis Austin and Thomas Rudkin and was supposed to be called Presenter, but the name didn't stick due to trademark issues, so it was renamed PowerPoint in 1987 as suggested by Robert Gaskins.

In August 1987, Microsoft bought Forethought for $ 14 million and turned it into its graphics business unit, where the company continued to develop the software.

It was years later, in 1990, that the first version was presented alongside Windows 3.0. It was quite basic, with limited customization options and only allowed the slide to progress in one direction, forwards.

However, PowerPoint quickly became one of Microsoft's most iconic trademarks and its first major acquisition. Even today, it holds up to 95 percent of the presentation software market share.

Microsoft PowerPoint features

Microsoft PowerPoint allows users to create rich presentations with multimedia options and a series of slides. Because it is fully integrated with the other tools in the Microsoft Office suite, content created with Excel or Word can be imported into PowerPoint, as well as other media such as images, audio, and video clips.

In addition, it offers a series of templates to provide the user with predefined designs for different purposes.

During a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, the presenter has the freedom to define the pace by manually controlling the flow of the slides or by having them change at preset intervals.

Microsoft PowerPoint underwent a significant change in PowerPoint 97 when it added predefined transition effects and allowed users to schedule them so that slides advanced automatically. This enabled the presenter to follow a predefined progression and continue the presentation without pausing to change or read the slides.

In previous versions, presentations were saved only in the standard .pptx format. However, the more recent 2013 and 2016 versions allow users to save presentations in different formats, such as images (JPEG, GIF, PNG, etc.), videos (WMV or MPEG-4), or text (PDF).

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