Microsoft PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint is a popular presentation program widely used by businesses, educators and trainers. The program allows for comparing and merging changes in presentations, the ability to define animation paths for individual shapes, multiple slides, a "task plane" to view and select text and objects on the clipboard, automatic "photoalbum" generation, and the use of "smart tags" allowing people to quickly select the format of the text copied into the presentation.

PowerPoint was originally developed by Bob Gaskins, a former Berkeley Ph.D. student who envisioned and easy-to-use presentation program that would manipulate a string of slides. In 1984, Gaskins joined Forethought, a failing software firm and hired a software developer, Dennis Austin. Their prototype program, called Presenter, was later renamed PowerPoint (as the previous name risked intellectual property rights violations.) PowerPoint 1.0 was released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh. It ran in black and white, generating text-and-graphics pages that a photocopier could turn into overhead transparencies. Later, in 1987, Forethought and PowerPoint were purchased by Microsoft for $14 million. In 1988, the first Windows and DOS versions were produced. PowerPoint has since been a standard part of the Microsoft Office suite of applications.

Supporters and critics generally agree that PowerPoint's ease of use can save a lot of time for people who otherwise would have used other types of visual aid -- hand-drawn or mechanically typeset slides, blackboards or whiteboards, or overhead projections. However, this same ease is the root of many of the greatest criticisms of the program. In his essay The cognitive style of PowerPoint, Edward Tufte critiques many emergent properties of the software:

• "Its use to guide and reassure a presenter, rather than to enlighten the audience."
  
• "Unhelpfully simplistic tables and charts, resulting from the low resolution of computer displays."
  
• "The outliner causing ideas to be arranged in an unnecessarily deep hierarchy, itself subverted by the need to restart the hierarchy on each slide."
  
• "Enforcement of the audience's linear progression through that hierarchy (whereas with handouts, readers could "
  
• "Poor typography and chart layout, from presenters who are poor designers and who use poorly-designed templates and default settings."
  
• "Simplistic thinking, from ideas being squashed into bulleted lists, and stories with beginning, middle, and end being turned into a collection of disparate, loosely disguised points. This may present a kind of image of objectivity and neutrality that people associate with science, technology, and "bullet points".