In PowerPoint, as in most other presentation software, text, graphics, movies, and other objects are positioned on individual pages or 'slides'. Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, released in November 2006, brought major changes of the user interface and enhanced graphic capabilities. It also improved support for graphics and multimedia. It enhanced collaboration between co-workers and featured 'Package for CD', which makes it easy to burn presentations with multimedia content and the viewer on CD-ROM for distribution. Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 did not differ much from the 2002/XP version. The 2002 version, part of the Microsoft Office XP Professional suite and also available as a stand-alone product, provided features such as comparing and merging changes in presentations, the ability to define animation paths for individual shapes, pyramid/radial/target and Venn diagrams, multiple slide masters, a 'task pane' to view and select text and objects on the clipboard, password protection for presentations, automatic 'photo album' generation, and the use of 'smart tags' allowing people to quickly select the format of text copied into the presentation. Since 1990, PowerPoint has been a standard part of the Microsoft Office suite of applications (except for the Basic Edition).

In 1990, the first Windows versions were produced. Microsoft Corporation purchased Forethought and its PowerPoint software product for $14 million on July 31, 1987. A new full color version of PowerPoint shipped a year later after the first color Macintosh came to market. It ran in black and white, generating text-and-graphics pages for overhead transparencies. PowerPoint 1.0 was released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh. The original Microsoft Office PowerPoint was developed by Bob Gaskins and software developer Dennis Austin as Presenter for Forethought, Inc, which they later renamed PowerPoint. The about box for PowerPoint 1.0, with an empty document in the background.

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