Microsoft PowerPoint is a product sold both by itself and bundled as part of Microsoft Office. It serves customers who make presentations and whose business success depends on said presentations. Although PowerPoint has gone through a number of phases to achieve its initial goals of giving users standard templates, the ability to print slides as handouts, and to communicate slides through electronic means, today the program sets the standard in presentation software and has grown to be a multibillion dollar industry.
Standard Templates
PowerPoint comes with 44 standard templates complete with a variety of graphics, borders, and layout designs. In addition, users can download templates for free from the Microsoft PowerPoint website. Templates can be assigned to all the slides in a presentation or can be individualized for each slide and can be embellished with graphics, logos, or photographs, and users can add voice or video narration to slides as they choose. If you are interested in information on how to do the latter, check out Noel Kalicharan's series of tutorials that describe using audio in PowerPoint presentations.
Prints Slides as Handouts
Noticing the need for audience handouts in conjunction with dictated presentations, PowerPoint also allows users to print physical handouts of notes associated with each slide. Originally intended to be separate from the slide itself, these handouts are created just below the slide in a text box marked “Notes.” Presenters can print an outline of their notes and have the choice of printing anywhere from 1 to 9 slides per page.
Communicate Slides Through Electronic Means
PowerPoint takes the meeting out of the board room by connecting users to the World Wide Web through embedded hyperlinks, video conferencing, and electronic file transferring. Users can publish their presentation as a web file or package it for CD.
Before PowerPoint was introduced to the personal computer community, business professionals and academics dealt with black and white overhead projectors and costly 34mm slides. Presenters worked with a team of graphic designers, artists, and layout specialist to create multimedia designs, and mistakes could not easily be fixed. Today, Microsoft PowerPoint gives the users the power to make, design, and control their presentations from start to finish.
