According to the popular downloads on the main page, PowerPoint 2, 3, and 4 have gotten 154593 downloads, topping all of the other groups. I wonder why this is specifically so popular?
A wild guess would be that (rather oblivious) people who don't have PowerPoint are trying to get one for free to make an assignment
Which might make sense if it were PowerPoint 2003 (the last sane version) or PowerPoint 97 (good version). But these aren't even Win32, just the Windows 3.1 and Mac versions.
You underestimate the need to have something for free at any cost in the last minute Especially if you have no clue on the differences between versions. Though it must be embarrassing to compare the terrible colour palletes of the early PPTs to those of 97 and beyond
Also, I must disagree on 2003 being the last sane version. I find PowerPoint (and Office in general) 2007 and beyond to be pretty good and have more options at the ready with the enlarged tabs. They retain most of, if not the same functionality as versions 2003 and prior. And that's coming from someone who's only started using a modern Office (2013) last summer
I agree, most people don't know how to use it right let alone a pain in the ass to use.
It's not so much that, it's more the point that any time people want to get ideas across, its always some hideously boring presentation where they just read shit from slides. I can read, I don't need some clown doing it for me.
PowerPoint slides are definitely over used. In college, nearly every single lecture involved a PowerPoint slide. Including ones that had nothing to do with the slides. Some professors seemed to have the slides up just for show. While others basically read verbatim from the slides.
But on the topic of using PowerPoint for class projects, I actually used to use the 3.1 version of PowerPoint for school. I used to have it on a floppy disk and run it portable. Kind of surprised it worked at all, but it did. Newer versions of Office would horribly butcher the files though, so you pretty much had to use the old version.
Also, as far as free PowerPoint goes, I should think a Google Docs would suit that purpose much better than an ancient version of PowerPoint that probably won't even run on a 64 bit install of Windows.
Comments
Also, I must disagree on 2003 being the last sane version. I find PowerPoint (and Office in general) 2007 and beyond to be pretty good and have more options at the ready with the enlarged tabs. They retain most of, if not the same functionality as versions 2003 and prior. And that's coming from someone who's only started using a modern Office (2013) last summer
It's not so much that, it's more the point that any time people want to get ideas across, its always some hideously boring presentation where they just read shit from slides. I can read, I don't need some clown doing it for me.
But on the topic of using PowerPoint for class projects, I actually used to use the 3.1 version of PowerPoint for school. I used to have it on a floppy disk and run it portable. Kind of surprised it worked at all, but it did. Newer versions of Office would horribly butcher the files though, so you pretty much had to use the old version.
Also, as far as free PowerPoint goes, I should think a Google Docs would suit that purpose much better than an ancient version of PowerPoint that probably won't even run on a 64 bit install of Windows.