1. PowerPoint Historical Review
cathleen belleville a bit better corporation

2. Who is this chick? 1989-1995: Microsoft 1995-2000: A Bit Better Corp.
PowerPoint product manager
head of product planning for graphics business unit
: A Bit Better Corp.
creator of “Screen Beans”
PowerPoint consulting services

3. Prehistoric Presentations
1981: IBM PCs
MS-DOS
Lotus 1-2-3
CPM-86
Word Perfect
slide presentations sent out to Genigraphics, Chartmasters
big business, slow turn-around, good results
overhead presentations made by enlarging typewriter pages, and copying on to transparencies
tedious, slow, expensive, bad results
any font you want as long as it was Courier 12
1984: Apple Macintosh
MacWrite
MacPaint
Word

4. April 1987: PowerPoint 1 published by Forethought of Sunnyvale, CA
originally named “Presenter” and designed for Windows 2.0
2 developers, 16 months
coding done using a Lisa with two 5 MB hard drives connected via the serial port
ran on any Macintosh with 512K RAM and a floppy drive—no hard disk required
All slides in one file
Slide Master
Handout Pages
Notes Pages
Slide Show
Lines, Boxes, Circles
Black and White
Hardbound Book

5. May 1988: PowerPoint 2
August 87, Microsoft acquires Forethought; product unit stays in California
Aldus ships Persuasion 1.0 for Macintosh:
outliner
multiple masters
graphing
polygons
Harvard Graphics for DOS
Lotus Freelance for DOS
Find/Replace
Spell Checking
Color (for Mac II)
Color Schemes
Shaded fills
Microsoft Packaging
Genigraphics driver for slides

6. May 1990: Win PowerPoint 2 first presentation product for Windows 3.0
fonts a major problem for everyone
Harvard Graphics announces move to OS/2; later ships Windows product with same UI as DOS version
Lotus Freelance ships newly designed product on OS/2, then Windows
Aldus slow to release buggy, slow Windows product with poor Mac file compatibility
256-color support
WYSIWYG, direct manipulation UI
Bullets!
Graphing
Share files with Mac
Translates Harvard Graphics Files

7. May 1992: PowerPoint 3 first app to require Windows 3.1
introduction of TrueType Fonts
major release with shared code between Mac and Windows versions
Aldus share leader on Macintosh
Harvard Graphics share leader on PCs
Microsoft puts serious effort into promoting Microsoft Office
Outlining
Drawing Tools
Transition Effects
Graphing on Mac
Builds
Flying Bullets
Sound & Video
Pen Computing support

8. February 1994: PowerPoint 4.0 the suite battles begin
Lotus ships SmartSuite:
1-2-3, Ami Pro, Freelance Graphics
Word Perfect ships PerfectOffice:
Word Perfect, Quattro Pro, Draw Perfect
Harvard Graphics can’t find a dance partner
Aldus ignores Windows market, focuses on Mac
Office look and feel: tooltips, toolbars, status bar
Full OLE 2.0
AutoLayouts
AutoContent Wizard
Word Tables
Rehearsal, Hidden Slides

9. February 1994: PowerPoint 7 application version numbers go to hell
Microsoft owns major market share on PCs and Macs due to phenomenal sales of Office
Lotus bought by IBM who pretends not to notice
WordPerfect bought by Novell
Aldus acquired by Adobe and left to rot
Harvard suffers slow agonizing death
Rewritten in C++
VBA programmability
Real curves, textures
New animation effects
Meeting minder
AutoCorrect, Insert Symbol
Black & White View

10. May 1997: PowerPoint 97 most of original PowerPoint team has left
Microsoft has dominant market share -- virtually no competition
central office development team makes most product decisions
focus on electronic presentations and on-line documents
virtually “documentation free”
Office Assistant
File compression
Save to HTML
Improved sound and animation controls
Pack and Go
AutoClipArt
ScreenBeans
Transparent GIFs

11. June 1999: Office 2000
now 4 versions of Office, that ship nine different products
typical installation of Office Premium: 626 MB for all nine apps
PowerPoint 2000
Tri-Pane View
Picture bullets
Animated GIFs
Save to Web
AutoFit Text
Real Tables
Presentation Conferencing
Aliased Fonts

12. Shameless Self Promotion
powerpoint FAQ with many many pages of questions
“ask powerpoint”: powerpoint questions answered
powerpoint tips and tricks
resources for presenters
screenbeans clip art, with new “business communication” collection

13. thank you for not throwing things
cathy belleville
a bit better corporation