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Happy Birthday PowerPoint!
20 Aug 2009
It has been 25 years since PowerPoint first came on to the market and we believe this is worth celebrating!
Microsoft Office's PowerPoint has dominated the likes of boardroom meetings, lectures and any other events in which people are called upon to present information. It is highly unlikely that during it's 25 years of existence, you have not sat through a PowerPoint presentation of some kind. PowerPoint has slowly taken over the business and educational world, it has changed the way that professors teach and how workers share knowledge. I mean, try and Imagine a life without PowerPoint?! How else could you communicate to such large audiences?
An article featured on the BBC News website entitled The Problem With PowerPoint highlights the main problems people tend to come across when viewing a presentation or creating one of their own. However, PowerPoint is still the most widely used presentation tool with 500 million users worldwide and 30 million presentations being made every day!
PowerPoint began as Presenter, but this was soon changed due to copy write restrictions. It was developed by Bob Gaskins and Dennis Austin. When Microsoft purchased it, PowerPoint was already a mass success, selling more on its first day of release for the Macintosh OS than any other program in history at the time. As the software package became more popular, there were significant developments in the market for projection equipment, making it so that PowerPoint would be used for more than just creating slides and transparencies.
Unlike most of the other software products that have made their way into the Office suite, PowerPoint has never had significant market competition. Hypercard for the Macintosh was used for presentations in fair numbers, but never approached PowerPoint in terms of market penetration for professional users. That software package was discontinued in the mid-1990s.
The future of PowerPoint's success looks set to continue with the release of PowerPoint 2010 next year, which Article 10 Presentations are currently reviewing. The new version holds numerous exciting features, including the ability to embed movie clips fully into a PowerPoint file, plus aesthetic effects that can be applied to a movie such as perspective changes, borders as well as a massive range of Photoshop style effects.
Article 10, the leading PowerPoint presentation specialists, are built largely through the use of PowerPoint and other Microsoft Office applications. We appreciate the impact a high impact and engaging PowerPoint presentation can have on an audience.
