Microsoft PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program,^[8] developed by Microsoft.

It was originally 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.^[8] Microsoft acquired PowerPoint for about $14 million three months after it appeared.^[10] This was Microsoft's first significant acquisition,^[11] and Microsoft set up a new business unit for PowerPoint in Silicon Valley where Forethought had been located.^[11]

PowerPoint became a component of the Microsoft Office suite, first offered in 1989 for Macintosh^[12] and in 1990 for Windows,^[13] which bundled several Microsoft apps. Beginning with PowerPoint 4.0 (1994), PowerPoint was integrated into Microsoft Office development, and adopted shared common components and a converged user interface.^[14]

PowerPoint's market share was very small at first, prior to introducing a version for Microsoft Windows, but grew rapidly with the growth of Windows and of Office.^{[15]: 402–404} Since the late 1990s, PowerPoint's worldwide market share of presentation software has been estimated at 95 percent.^[16]

PowerPoint was originally designed to provide visuals for group presentations within business organizations, but has come to be widely used in other communication situations in business and beyond.^[17] The wider use led to the development of the PowerPoint presentation as a new form of communication,^[18] with strong reactions including advice that it should be used less,^[19] differently,^[20] or better.^[21]

The first PowerPoint version (Macintosh, 1987) was used to produce overhead transparencies,^[22] the second (Macintosh, 1988; Windows, 1990) could also produce color 35 mm slides.^[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.^[22] A dozen major versions since then have added additional features and modes of operation^[14] and have made PowerPoint available beyond Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows, adding versions for iOS, Android, and web access.^[23]