Happy 35th Anniversary, PowerPoint!

[Gandalf_The_Grey]

The year was 1987. Beverly Hills Cop, Platoon and Fatal Attraction were top box-office hits in the theaters. Whitney Houston, Bon Jovi, and Whitesnake sold millions of records (yes, vinyl records were still a thing). A gallon of gas cost 90 cents.

In the tech world, the Macintosh SE and Mac II were both released in March 1987. Microsoft was still on Windows 1.0 (until 2.0 was released in December). And a presentation software program called PowerPoint was released in April. (The program had to be installed on your computer from something called a “floppy disk.”

Those of you under 35 will probably have to look this up!)

Initially created by a small software company called Forethought and released only for Mac, PowerPoint was purchased in mid-1987 by Microsoft (one of the company’s first major acquisitions). A few years later, PowerPoint was included in a newly created suite of products called Microsoft Office.

Fast-forward 35 years, and PowerPoint (along with Office) has spread throughout the world, becoming the gold standard for business communications software. Millions of people use it every day to create and deliver compelling presentations for work, school, or just for fun. And the program continues to evolve, with new features being added just about every month (as Office Insiders well know).

To celebrate the 35th anniversary of PowerPoint (officially landing on April 20th), we decided to ask some of the world’s foremost PowerPoint experts (Microsoft MVPs) to give us their thoughts about the best new features released in the last year or so.

Here’s to 35 more years (and beyond) of great presentations with PowerPoint!

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