Updated April 5, 2023
Introduction to Power Point Version
PowerPoint version is the version of Microsoft PowerPoint, which we have to date. MS PowerPoint is a presentation application made by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin in a Software Company Forethought Inc. and was released on April 20, 1987, for Mac Operating Systems. The first PowerPoint version was in 1987, was used in producing transparencies, and the second version came up in 1988, which was used to produce 35 mm slides and so on. One of the IT giants, Microsoft, has acquired PowerPoint for about $14 million within three months of its appearance, which is one of the biggest acquisitions of Microsoft, and set up a new unit in Silicon Valley where Forethought Inc. also was located in. Let us see how Microsoft PowerPoint has evolved and is a part of every Software Engineer in this generation.
PowerPoint has become a component of Microsoft Office, first in 1989 for Mac and in 1990 for Windows, which has a bundle of Microsoft apps. Powerpoint was designed to produce visuals for group presentations within the organization. PowerPoint market share was very small at the start, before introducing Microsoft Windows. In the late 1990s, Power point’s market share was estimated at 95 percent worldwide.
Based on statistics, it has been almost 34 years for PowerPoint; 95 percent of the presentation are created in Powerpoint. There is almost 30 million power presentation done, and over 500 million people are using this software.
Timeline and History of PowerPoint
Timeline and History of PowerPoint explain below:
- Idea Creation: 5th July 1984: Robert Gaskins is a Vice President at Forethought Inc. for product development. His task was involved creating a new software application, and 1 month later, he came up with the idea of PowerPoint, and this project was named “Overhead Projection or Presentation Graphics.”
- Development Start: November 1984: Development started to work at Macintosh version first, and then after 6 months, another developer named Thomas Rudkin joined for development.
- Funding by Apple Company: January 1987: For continuing development, Forethought Inc. needed funding, and Apple was the one was selected as its first investment.
- Establishment of name “PowerPoint”: Application name was previously named as “Presenter,” but when the software was registered for trademark, lawyers did not agree for the name as it was already used by some other software. Hence team had to come up with a name such as “OverHead Maker” and “SlideMaker”. Gaskin and Glenn independently had a similar idea of naming software as “Power point.”
- Power Point Version 1.0: The first version of Mac was shipped by Forethought Inc. and almost 10000 copies for customers.
- Acquisition by Microsoft: July 1987: Microsoft started an internal project to develop software as “create presentations.” At the same time, Company heard about PowerPoint software which was already developed, and hence Microsoft bought Forethought Inc. company completely.
- Version 2.0: May 1988: The next year, the second version of this software was released. It included extra features like color, word processing features, spell check, color checks, shading color fills, etc.
- Version for Windows: May 1990: Almost after 3 years, PowerPoint software was released for Windows OS, it was released at the time of Windows 3.0 release itself.
- PowerPoint 3.0: May & September 1990: New features were added, presentation templates, freeform tool, rotate, scale, flip, alignment and transform pictures, slide show transitions with sound and video.
- PowerPoint 4.0: February & October 1994: This new version included hidden slides, rehearsal mode. Microsoft had first introduced as a standard Office tool similar to MS Word and Excel, with toolbars and tooltips.
- PowerPoint 95: July 1995: To make PowerPoint look similar to all other applications, Microsoft had decided to skip version 5 and 6 and name it directly as PowerPoint 95.
- PowerPoint 2003: October 2003: This version was the first to introduce “Presenter View,” i.e., tools to be visible to the presenter during slide shows. It also included an option to write and view an app on a CD.
- PowerPoint 2007: January 2007: A new user interface was introduced, smart graphics in drawing and text. Improvement in presenter view. One major change was the transition from binary format to new XML format.
- PowerPoint 2010: June 2010: It added other improvements like Reading view, inserting videos from the web, embedding audio and video, with enhanced editing options.
- PowerPoint Web: October 2012: For the first time, this software can be used in a web browser without installation.
- PowerPoint 2013: January 2013: Changes include clipart collections being removed but had access online. I had an option to collab with multiple authors, improve in audio and video animations, and some modifications to the Presenter’s view.
- PowerPoint App for Mobiles: July 2013: The first version was released in Android and IOS mobiles, basic editing of slides was available, and there was an optimized version for iPad’s.
- PowerPoint 2019: September 2018: New additions like morphing, removing backgrounds, insertion of SVG images and 3D models along with a Zoom feature. The customer faces some struggles while using PowerPoint; below are some of the issues listed.
- The file being too large, PowerPoint files are way much big in size because of the images, videos being used. The user had to compress the file without losing its quality.
- The wrong language: At sometimes, the wrong language is added by default which had to be removed while editing slides.
- Creating templates: Even though templates are useful, but not many people use these templates.
- Wrong font: Once the user designs a presentation and plays on some other system, all the fonts applied are gone. This issue was resolved by saving the presentation file with the .pptx extension.
- PowerPoint version: We have several methods to find out which version of Microsoft PowerPoint is in your system. As PowerPoint is a part of Microsoft Suite, the same version is applicable to PowerPoint as well.
- Also, there is another way to know the version, i.e., Go to About Window in PowerPoint; you can see on the top right, there is an option “About PowerPoint.” A window opens up where an exact version of PowerPoint is shown.
Conclusion
With this, we shall conclude this topic ‘PowerPoint Version”. We have seen what the PowerPoint version means and referred to the History of PowerPoint and how it was created. We have also seen a timeline of events done for making PowerPoint a part of Microsoft Suite. There are some struggles customers face during designing or presentation, but still, most of the issues are resolved. Also seen some ways of how to know the version of PowerPoint software.
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