Microsoft PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation software developed by Microsoft, originally created in the 1980s by Robert Gaskins and his team before being acquired by the tech giant. It became a core component of the Office suite that Microsoft bundled together in the 1990s alongside Word and Excel . By 2010, Microsoft announced PowerPoint had been installed on over one billion computers worldwide, making it the dominant tool for office presentations, academic lectures, religious sermons, and even personal events like weddings and funerals .

The software democratized multimedia presentation design, allowing ordinary users to create slides with visual effects that previously required professional expertise—though critics like data visualization expert Edward Tufte argued it also encouraged "chartjunk" and shallow, slogan-driven communication. Gaskins himself later acknowledged that PowerPoint's power as a tool had contributed to a decline in presentation quality, with "more and more business and academic speeches looking like bad sales pitches" . In the AI era, PowerPoint remains the incumbent format that new AI agents—from MiniMax to Kimi to dedicated tools like Nano Banana Pro—are racing to generate, animate, and redesign .