Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program,[8] created by Robert Gaskins, Tom Rudkin, and Dennis Austin[8] at a software company named Forethought, Inc.[8] It was released on April 20, 1987,[9] initially for Macintosh computers only.

[22] The third version (Windows and Macintosh 1992) introduced video output of virtual slideshows to digital projectors, which would over time replace physical transparencies and slides.

[25] On July 5, 1984, Forethought hired Robert Gaskins as its vice president of product development[26]: 51  to create a new application that would be especially suited to the new graphical personal computers, such as the Apple Macintosh and later Microsoft Windows.

Gaskins says that he thought of "PowerPoint", based on the product's goal of "empowering" individual presenters, and sent that name to the lawyers for clearance, while all the documentation was hastily revised.

'"[43] On April 28, 1987, a week after shipment, a group of Microsoft's senior executives spent another day at Forethought to hear about initial PowerPoint sales on Macintosh and plans for Windows.

[45] As requested in that letter of intent, Robert Gaskins from Forethought went to Redmond for a one-on-one meeting with Bill Gates in early June 1987,[26]: 197  and by the end of July an agreement was concluded for an acquisition.

[48] All the PowerPoint people from Forethought joined Microsoft, and the new location was headed by Robert Gaskins, with Dennis Austin and Thomas Rudkin leading development.

The GBU had moved to a new location on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California; it was much larger than needed for 19 people, but Gaskins wrote that he and Microsoft wanted future capacity as the company grew in Silicon Valley.

[14] When it was released, the computer press reported on the change approvingly: "PowerPoint 4.0 has been re-engineered from the ground up to resemble and work with the latest applications in Office: Word 6.0, Excel 5.0, and Access 2.0.

Special guests were Robert Gaskins, Dennis Austin, and Thomas Rudkin, and the featured speaker was Jeff Raikes, all from PowerPoint 1.0 days, 20 years before.

Although the PowerPoint software had been used to generate transparencies for over a decade, this usage was not typically encompassed by a common understanding of the term.In contemporary operation, PowerPoint is used to create a file (called a "presentation" or "deck") containing a sequence of pages (called "slides" in the app) which usually have a consistent style (from template masters), and which may contain information imported from other apps or created in PowerPoint, including text, bullet lists, tables, charts, drawn shapes, images, audio clips, video clips, animations of elements, and animated transitions between slides, plus attached notes for each slide.

PowerPoint for the web does not support inserting or editing charts, equations, or audio or video stored on your PC, but they are all displayed in the presentation if they were added in using a desktop app.

"[102]: 76–77  Business people had for a long time made presentations for sales calls and for internal company communications, and PowerPoint produced the same formats in the same style and for the same purposes.

CEOs who very early were reported to discourage or ban PowerPoint presentations at internal business meetings included Lou Gerstner (at IBM, in 1993),[105] Scott McNealy (at Sun Microsystems, in 1996),[106] and Steve Jobs (at Apple, in 1997).

"[109] In 1998, at about the same time that Gold was pronouncing PowerPoint's ubiquity in business, the influential Bell Labs engineer Robert W. Lucky could already write about broader uses:[110] ... the world has run amok with the giddy power of presentation graphics.

... How have we gotten on so long without PowerPoint?Over a decade or so, beginning in the mid-1990s, PowerPoint began to be used in many communication situations, well beyond its original business presentation uses, to include teaching in schools[111] and in universities,[112] lecturing in scientific meetings[113] (and preparing their related poster sessions[114]), worshipping in churches,[115] making legal arguments in courtrooms,[116] displaying supertitles in theaters,[117] driving helmet-mounted displays in spacesuits for NASA astronauts,[118] giving military briefings,[119] issuing governmental reports,[120] undertaking diplomatic negotiations,[121][122] writing novels,[123] giving architectural demonstrations,[124] prototyping website designs,[125] creating animated video games,[126] editing images,[127] creating art projects,[128] and even as a substitute for writing engineering technical reports,[129] and as an organizing tool for writing general business documents.

"With the widespread adoption of PowerPoint came complaints ... often very general statements reflecting dissatisfaction with modern media and communication practices as well as the dysfunctions of organizational culture.

These costs arise from the cognitive style characteristics of the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, an intensely hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narratives and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous chartjunk and PP Phluff, branding of slides with logotypes, a preoccupation with format not content, incompetent designs for data graphics and tables, and a smirky commercialism that turns information into a sales pitch and presenters into marketeers [italics in original].Tufte particularly advised against using PowerPoint for reporting scientific analyses, using as a dramatic example some slides made during the flight of the space shuttle Columbia after it had been damaged by an accident at liftoff, slides which poorly communicated the engineers' limited understanding of what had happened.

This reaction is exemplified by Richard E. Mayer, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has studied cognition and learning, particularly the design of educational multimedia, and who has published more than 500 publications, including over 30 books.

[151] Kosslyn presented a set of psychological principles of "human perception, memory, and comprehension" that "appears to capture the major points of agreement among researchers.

For this reason, Kosslyn says, users need specific education to be able to identify best ways to avoid "flaws and failures":[152] Specifically, we hypothesized and found that the psychological principles are often violated in PowerPoint slideshows across different fields ..., that some types of presentation flaws are noticeable and annoying to audience members ..., and that observers have difficulty identifying many violations in graphical displays in individual slides ... .

[157] By 2000, ten years after PowerPoint for Windows appeared, it was already identified as an important feature of U.S. armed forces culture, in a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal:[158] Old-fashioned slide briefings, designed to update generals on troop movements, have been a staple of the military since World War II.

Just as word processing made it easier to produce long, meandering memos, the spread of PowerPoint has unleashed a blizzard of jazzy but often incoherent visuals.

The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not least, it ties up junior officers ... in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader's pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan.The New York Times account went on to say that as a result some U.S. generals had banned the use of PowerPoint in their operations:[159] "PowerPoint makes us stupid," Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina.

"Several incidents, about the same time, gave wide currency to discussions by serving military officers describing excessive PowerPoint use and the organizational culture that encouraged it.

"[163] The two generals who had been mentioned in 2010 as opposing the institutional culture of excessive PowerPoint use were both in the news again in 2017, when James N. Mattis became U.S. Secretary of Defense,[164] and H. R. McMaster was appointed as U.S. National Security Advisor.

It started off as a joke (this software is a symbol of corporate salesmanship, or lack thereof) but then the work took on a life of its own as I realized I could create pieces that were moving, despite the limitations of the 'medium.

When he presented it in Berkeley, on March 8, 2005, the University of California news service reported: "Byrne also defended [PowerPoint's] appeal as more than just a business tool—as a medium for art and theater.

The first objective was for the Open XML standard to provide an XML-based file format that could fully support conversion of the billions of existing Office documents without any loss of features, content, text, layout, or other information, including embedded data.