What Are Powerpoint Templates?
PowerPoint is business productivity software included in the Microsoft Office Suite. The purpose of PowerPoint is to create slides and presentations with reusable graphic elements and themes. PowerPoint is packaged with several precreated themes and templates which may be used to quickly create business presentations, tutorials and slide shows.
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History
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PowerPoint evolved from a predecessor program named Presenter. Forethought, Inc. released Presenter as the first application of its kind in 1987. Prior to the release of Presenter, presentation slides were created by graphic design studios charging as much as $240 per hour for the work. The first release of Presenter was a Mac-based application, as Windows had not yet been invented. In August of 1987, Microsoft purchased the Presenter application and brand from Forethought, Inc. for approximately $14 million. Presenter was rebranded and released as PowerPoint 1.0 in September 1987. PowerPoint 1.0 was compatible with both Mac-based and DOS-based systems.
Microsoft immediately began working with Genigraphics, a leading provider of presentation graphics at the time, to standardize file types and protocols for PowerPoint. Genigraphics designers created many of the PowerPoint standard templates that are still shipped with the product today.
Significance
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PowerPoint templates are useful for creating standard business templates for presentations. For example, companies may create a standard PowerPoint template to be utilized with all sales or other types of presentations. This template will include the company logo, background images, and colors, fonts, styles and formatting to be use to represent the company in presentations. Templates may be easily shared or uploaded to a common location for employee use.
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Features
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PowerPoint templates are prebuilt slide structures, which include formatting and styling information.. Many standard templates are provided with PowerPoint when it is installed. Templates may also be created and customized for use in PowerPoint. Prior to MS Office 2007, PowerPoint templates were indicated with file extensions of .pot.
Unique Design
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Beginning with PowerPoint 1997 and continuing with the 2000 release, two major new features were introduced and incorporated into PowerPoint: the ability to apply transitions between slides, and the ability to add sound to presentations. Unique to PowerPoint, these features extend the application beyond a graphics design tool.
Status
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As of 2009, the most current version is PowerPoint 2007, included in the MicroSoft Office 2007 suite of products. Beginning with this new version, the PowerPoint template file type has been renamed to .potx.
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References
- Photo Credit Village Commons Bookstore, GeekPedia
