Microsoft Power Point

Microsoft Power Point

It's all about making a point. 

Sometimes using an image helps make the point. Scribbling on a cocktail napkin, sketching in the sand, marking up a board or sculpting thin air - whatever it takes. It's a really important point.Sometimes it takes PowerPoint. Like any amazingly useful tool, it's important to learn how to use it. Office.com has loads of helpful information - A gazillion words. A great whopping number of images. Where to begin? Here: Roadmap to building a PowerPoint 2007 presentation

Speaking Visually: Eight Roles Pictures Play in Presentation. Picture = 1K words

And the research says? PowerPoint meets cognitive science Why a picture = 1K words

And here's your cheat sheet - Tips for creating and delivering an effective presentation

Microsoft PowerPoint is a proprietary commercial presentation program developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Microsoft Office suite, and runs on Microsoft Windows and Apple’s Mac OS X operating system. The current versions are Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2010 for Windows and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.

History

Originally designed for the Macintosh computer, the initial release was called "Presenter", developed by Dennis Austin and Thomas Rudkin ofForethought, Inc. In 1987, it was renamed to "PowerPoint" due to problems with trademarks, the idea for the name coming from Robert Gaskins.In August of the same year, Forethought was bought by Microsoft for $14 million USD ($28.6 million in present-day terms), 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 changed significantly with 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.

Operation

PowerPoint presentations consist of a number of individual pages or "slides". The "slide" analogy is a reference to the slide projector. Slides may contain text, graphics, sound, movies, and other objects, which may be arranged freely. PowerPoint, however, facilitates the use of a consistent style in a presentation using a template or "Slide Master".

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 

       waysz

3.    Custom animation can be used to create small story boards by animating pictures to enter, exit or move.

Cultural impact

Supporters say that the ease of use of presentation software can save a lot of time for people who otherwise would have used other types of visual aid—hand-drawn or mechanically typeset slides, blackboards or whiteboards, or overhead projections. Ease of use also encourages those who otherwise would not have used visual aids, or would not have given a presentation at all, to make presentations. As PowerPoint's style, animation, and multimedia abilities have become more sophisticated, and as the application has generally made it easier to produce presentations (even to the point of having an "AutoContent Wizard" (discontinued in PowerPoint 2007) suggesting a structure for a presentation), the difference in needs and desires of presenters and audiences has become more noticeable.

The benefit of PowerPoint is continually debated, though most people believe that the benefit may be to present structural presentations to business workers, such as Raytheon Elcan does.  Its use in classroom lectures has influenced investigations of PowerPoint’s effects on student performance in comparison to lectures based on overhead projectors, traditional lectures, and online lectures. Not only is it a useful tool for introductory lectures, but it also has many functions that allow for review games, especially in the younger grades. There are no compelling results to prove or disprove that PowerPoint is more effective for learner retention than traditional presentation methods. The effect on audiences of poor PowerPoint presentations has been described as PowerPoint hell.

File formats

PowerPoint Presentation
Filename extension	.ppt, .pptx, .pps, or .ppsx
Internet media type	application/vnd.ms-powerpoint
Developed by	Microsoft
Type of format	Presentation

The binary format specification has been available from Microsoft on request, but since February 2008 the .ppt format specification can be freely downloaded.

In Microsoft Office 2007 the binary file formats were replaced as the default format by the new XML based Office Open XML formats, which are published as an open standard. Nevertheless, they are not complete as there are binary blobs inside of the XML files, and several pieces of behaviour are not specified but refer to the observed behaviour of specific versions of Microsoft product.