Microsoft PowerPoint is one of the (if not the) most popular presentation makers available to the academic and business crowd. This is almost entirely due to it’s inclusion in Microsoft Office. The question we are here to pose today is what will happen to PowerPoint as we know it? Evolve into a more advanced program, or simply go extinct?
An excellent question! The reasons are quite simple. Here are a few:
1. Audience expectations have been risen. Now that we can all edit are home movies and upload them to video sharing sites static presentations are starting to seem a bit old fashioned.
2. Specialized tools for tasks like video editing and flash animation have come down significantly in price. In fact both Windows and Mac operating systems come with a built in basic editor.
3. More and more people know how to code. In the baby boomer generation, coders were a rare breed. Gen X and Y have changed that significantly. More people who can code means more customization and more use of advanced features.
4. More WYSIWYG editors are available for non coding users. Sure, you may not be able to flash animate with a WYSIWYG editor yet, but a website with embedded video is already much easier than it was five years ago.
So what do these trends mean for PowerPoint? Really it has two options – evolve with the times or become a thing of the past. Since extinction is kind of a dead end lets look at some ways that PowerPoint can stay on top.
Option One: Enhanced Video Capabilities
Giving users video editing capability in the program could be a big boon! In this scenario Powerpoint slides become a series of video clips that can be strung together in any order. If this was coupled with a serious upgrade to text quality and backgrounds, it could make PowerPoint the next generation presentation maker and give users an alternative to the finicky move maker. (Note that PowerPoint video editing functionality is one of the included features in PowerPoint 2010.)
Option Two: Expand kiosk mode to allow for greater flexibility during a presentation.
The ability to split the screen between text with audio narration or a video version would allow users to choose the style that works best for them.
Of course none of us know what the future will hold. Maybe PowerPoint will adapt in ways we can’t imagine. If Microsoft decides that the main competition is projects like Zoho Office or Google Docs, it may even become a stripped down web tool.