Originally developed by Forethought, who Microsoft bought out, PPT is the worlds most popular presentation file format. It is a very powerful tool that you can use to create presentations that include pictures, graphs, text and many other objects. Many businesses and students that have to present something will almost always do their presentation using Microsoft PowerPoint.
A large part of any presentation is how the text enters, appears and exits the screen. Entrance, emphasis, and exit of elements on a slide itself are controlled by what PowerPoint calls Custom Animations Transitions. These can be animated in a variety of ways. For example you can customise the animation to create small story boards by animating pictures to enter, exit or move. With different type of callouts, speech bubbles with edited text can be sent on and off to create speech. The overall design of a presentation can dictate how all the other slides appear and operate, this is called a master slide. Everything from design to the text on the slide can be edited using a primitive outliner.
The GIF file format is a type of bitmap image and has become popular due to the growth of the internet. This file format supports up to 8 bits per pixel therefore giving an image the ability to contain 256 distinct colours chosen from the 24-bit RGB colour space. It also supports animations and whenever you see a logo or other sharp edged line art then you are probably dealing with the GIF format. It uses the lossless data compression technique which reduces the file size without any impact on the quality.
The GIF file format was invented by Compuserve for their online service, but they made the specifications publicly available. GIFs are able to hold multiple bitmaps of up to 256 colors each, using LZW (Lempel Zev Welch - a simple form of file compression that removes inefficiencies in the data storage without losing data or distorting the image) compressed raster data to minimize file sizes. The idea is to lessen the amount of colours in a GIF image to the minimum number necessary and to therefore remove stray colors that are not required to represent the image. A GIF graphic is unable to have more than 256 colors but it can have fewer colors, down to the minimum of two (black and white). Images with fewer colors will compress more efficiently under LZW compression.
Associated programs
Adobe Photoshop Apple Preview Corel Paint Shop Pro Microsoft Windows Photo Gallery Viewer
