The inventor of PPT died! Why does PPT become a must for migrant workers?

Beijing, September 12, CCTV News (He Jia, Yang Yang, a reporter from the Voice of China) According to the News Hyperlink of the Voice of China, China National Radio and Television, on September 1 local time, Dennis Austin, the inventor of PowerPoint, died at his home in Los Altos, California, USA.

PowerPoint has a household abbreviation: PPT. PPT can be seen everywhere, whether in school classroom teaching or enterprise new product release. As an important part of Microsoft Office Tool Suite, global users now use PowerPoint to create more than 30 million presentations every day.

How did PPT come into being and develop? How to evaluate a PPT? Why can't Word replace PPT?

Everyone can make slides

Huang Hao, a digital commentator, said that PowerPoint did not appear in Windows at the earliest, but in Apple's Mac system. In 1987, Microsoft bought PowerPoint for 14 million dollars. Although there was still a dispute about whether the graphical interface or the character interface was the future development trend, the fact proved that Microsoft's acquisition was a very successful business move, which provided opportunities for later acquisition of business space in the field of image and text processing and tables, so that whether Microsoft Office, It is also a domestic WPS or an Apple suite, which is a three piece office suite. There is no doubt that the usage and operation logic of Apple's Keynote and WPS presentations are derived from the extension of PowerPoint to the habits of users in the industry.

When PowerPoint first appeared, making slides was a labor-intensive task, requiring manual drawing of film to insert into the slide projector. Most of the time was not spent on creativity, but how to achieve it. But in the PPT era, various convenient one click operations make the implementation process simple, and most of the time is reserved for creativity. As a result, the labor range is less, but the process of thinking about how to do PPT is greatly increased.

Nowadays, only a projector or a large screen TV set is needed to connect to a computer, and it is very convenient to use PPT for demonstration. The form is not limited to pictures and text, but also can insert other annotations such as videos to help speakers better understand and elaborate the content expressed. For the audience, especially in the education market, because the information is disassembled into various forms such as voice, image and text, this content with both voice and emotion is also easier to be recognized and accepted.

What kind of PPT is "good"?

Huang Hao believes that a good evaluation standard for PPT is that it can be clearly expressed with the speaker, which not only conveys the amount of information, but also expresses the key points.

People need to cooperate with each other in various ways to obtain information, such as text, image and voice. Too much information in a day will produce a sense of information explosion. Therefore, how to balance the amount of information in PPT and how to highlight the key points in the amount of information is more important than doing PPT by hand.

PPT also needs to take care of display equipment. Most computer or TV screens are 16:9, and commercial large screens are 21:9. Different aspect ratios determine that the visual elements filled on the screen are different. The use of PPT templates can solve aesthetic problems to a large extent and achieve twice the result with half the effort, but it also challenges the producers' understanding of the purpose and occasion of PPT. For example, the use of orchid style templates in commercial proposals is obviously not matched.

Some PPTs for product launches of large companies need to be polished for a long time, and the design costs are also high. This is because the design elements in PPTs need to be refined, and the amount of information on each page needs to be balanced with the time for the audience to receive information. Materials and manuscripts need to constantly cooperate with speakers, which is a huge system project. With the blessing of AI technology in the future, we may be able to improve the basic level of doing PPT, but if we want to pursue better results, we may still be a PPT expert.

Word or PPT? The best is the right one

Word, as an office software, also has powerful functions. Jobs even said, "People who know what they are talking about don't need PowerPoint at all." Why can't Word replace PowerPoint? Huang Hao said that the difference between the display device and the use scenario determines that Word documents and PowerPoint slides will be handled in a completely different way.

Word itself is not a software for screen display, and its format is centered on printing; PPT is placed on the screen and is not usually used as print content. As a result, Word will have margins to facilitate printing and binding, and the font is mostly Song typeface, while the font of PPT is mostly Microsoft Yahei.

Of course, in many cases, Word is more efficient than PPT in conveying information. In the workplace, it is not necessary to be bound to use PPT to complete a job. The appropriate form is the best. If we excessively pursue the sense of form, we may eventually generalize into formalism, which will lead to additional waste of time and efficiency.

key word: PPT Yahei inventor Workplace PowerPoint