About Microsoft PowerPoint
Microsoft PowerPoint is a popular presentation program developed for the
Microsoft Windows and Mac OS computer operating systems. Being widely used by businesspeople,
educators, and trainers, it is among the most prevalent forms of persuasion technology:
according to its vendor, Microsoft Corporation, some 30 million presentations are made with
PowerPoint every day.
Operation
In PowerPoint, as in most other presentation software, text, graphics,
movies, and other objects are positioned on individual pages or "slides".
The "slide" analogy is a reference to the slide projector, a device which has become somewhat
obsolete due to the use of PowerPoint and other presentation
software. 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.
Presentations can be saved and run in any of the file formats: the default
.ppt (presentation), .pot (template) or .pps (PowerPoint Show).
History
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. Since
1990, PowerPoint has 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, password 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. 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 Keynote,
or OpenOffice.org Impress -- has become the ability to open PowerPoint
files. However, because of PowerPoint's ability to embed content from other
applications through OLE, some kinds of presentations become highly tied to the
Windows platform, meaning that even PowerPoint on e.g.
Mac OS cannot always successfully open its own files originating in the
Windows version. This has led to a movement towards open standards, such as
PDF and OASIS.
Cultural effects
Supporters and critics generally agree that PowerPoint's ease of use 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. That same ease of use means that others may be encouraged to make presentations
who otherwise would not have used visual aids, or would not have given a presentation at all.
But as PowerPoint's style, animation, and multimedia abilities have become
more sophisticated, and as PowerPoint has become generally easier to produce presentations
with (even to the point of having an "AutoContent Wizard" suggesting a
structure for a presentation), the difference in needs and desires of presenters and
audiences has become more noticeable.
One major source of criticism of PowerPoint comes from Yale professor of
statistics and graphic design Edward Tufte. In his essay The cognitive style
of PowerPoint, Tufte criticizes many emergent properties of the software:
-
Its use to guide and reassure a presenter, rather than to enlighten the audience;
-
Unhelpfully simplistic tables and charts, resulting from the low resolution of computer
displays;
-
The outliner causing ideas to be arranged in an unnecessarily deep hierarchy, itself
subverted by the need to restart the hierarchy on each slide;
-
Enforcement of the audience's linear progression through that hierarchy (whereas with
handouts, readers could browse and relate items at their leisure);
-
Poor typography and chart layout, from presenters who are poor designers and who use
poorly-designed templates and default settings;
-
Simplistic thinking, from ideas being squashed into bulleted lists, and stories with
beginning, middle, and end being turned into a collection of disparate, loosely disguised
points. This may present a kind of image of objectivity and neutrality that people
associate with science, technology, and "bullet points".
Tufte's criticism of the use of PowerPoint has extended to its use by
NASA engineers in the events leading to the Columbia disaster.
Although many of Tufte's points seem to be well-taken, a number of experts strongly disagree
with his analysis for a variety of reasons - see the article "Five Experts Disagree
with Tufte on PowerPoint" here (http://www.sociablemedia.com/articles_dispute.htm).
Cliff Atkinson, a management consultant at Sociable Media (http://www.sociablemedia.com), has
written extensively about organizational issues related to PowerPoint,
including interviews with experts from the fields of marketing, cognitive science, law,
information design, and more (http://www.sociablemedia.com/credential_articles.htm).
University of Toronto management professor David Beatty says: "PowerPoint is
like a disease. It's the AIDS of management." He advises spending 85 percent of one's time on
figuring out what to say, and only 15 percent on how. He also reports that
3M has strongly discouraged the use of PowerPoint because
"it removes subtlety and thinking", and the company believes that it causes people to focus
on pretty pictures rather than doing what they are paid to do. Other prominent executives in
the information technology industry have declared their offices "PowerPoint-free zones".
Peter Norvig created a PowerPoint version of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg
Address as a tongue-in-cheek example of the presentation style often associated with
PowerPoint. Norvig published his slides on his website in
2000. It was subsequently picked up by several early blogs as well as the Wall Street Journal
as an illustration of how a carefully crafted and successful speech can be turned into a
disjointed set of garish slides, which even included gratuitous data plots.
Meanwhile, some have celebrated the abilities of PowerPoint for artistic
purposes. David Byrne, for example, created artworks with PowerPoint for his book and DVD
Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information.
<< Back to .PPT page
PowerPoint Links:
Official website of
PowerPoint at Microsoft
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