PowerPoint, recently released by Forethought, is a management and composition tool that gives you direct, personal control over the production of presentation graphics materials. PowerPoint accomplishes more preparation tasks than any other presentation software, including viewing and rearranging slide sequences, developing a visually unified presentation, and producing bulleted outlines, speaker’s notes, and audience handouts.
Shaping the Presentation
The best feature of PowerPoint is its ability to handle a presentation as a unit, eliminating the need to manage an unwieldy assortment of individual drawings and documents in separate files. With MacDraw, after you transfer documents to a single file, you must copy and paste the presentation format onto each page. In PowerPoint, elements that repeat on every page (borders, logos, sequence numbers, dates) need only be created once. Changes made to the master are reflected on all slides in the series, eliminating repetitive editing. If you need a slide without the master format, such as the closing slide, you can omit the master format. PowerPoint also lets you add text blocks and labels to your artwork and arrange and rearrange the order of your slides. The program’s management capabilities let you develop slide libraries and reuse slides. This is particularly convenient when you simply want to revise a presentation.
Macworld. (June 1987). Presenting PowerPoint. (pg. 152).
Some may think it is obvious, but for those who are not quite sure, this is the first version of what would become Microsoft PowerPoint. Microsoft purchased this program less than a year after it was released.