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Dennis Austin, who co-created PowerPoint, passed away at his home in Los Altos, California, on September 1st, reports The Washington Post<\/em><\/a>. His son, Michael Austin, said he\u2019d had lung cancer that had metastasized to his brain, according to the Post<\/em>. He was 76 years old.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Austin studied engineering at several universities, including MIT and UC Santa Barbara, before going to work as a software developer, eventually joining the software company Forethought and co-developing PowerPoint. The company released the software in 1987, and Microsoft bought the company just a few months later. Austin served as PowerPoint\u2019s primary developer from 1985 to 1996<\/a> when he retired.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Washington Post<\/em> notes that Robert Gaskins, PowerPoint\u2019s other co-creator, wrote in his book Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint<\/em> that Austin \u201ccame up with at least half of the major design ideas\u201d and added that if he hadn\u2019t been designing the software, \u201cno one would ever have heard of it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Despite its 36-year history as the most ubiquitous software for presentations, PowerPoint has its detractors; Jeff Bezos once said<\/a> that \u201cwe outlawed PowerPoint presentations at Amazon,\u201d calling the move \u201cprobably the smartest thing we ever did.\u201d Steve Jobs was quoted<\/a> in Walter Isaacson\u2019s Jobs<\/em> biography as saying, \u201cPeople who know what they\u2019re talking about don\u2019t need PowerPoint.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Atlantic<\/em> in August published a story about \u201c<\/em>The Great PowerPoint Panic of 2003,\u201d saying that 20 years ago, people thought it would \u201ccorrode our minds, degrade communication, and waste our time.\u201d Still, PowerPoint has had its fans, too, including The Talking Heads <\/em>lead singer David Byrne, though he loved it not for its intended purpose but for its potential as an artistic tool<\/a>. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n The software remains a key part of Microsoft\u2019s suite of office tools to this day. Recently, the company has begun adding AI tooling to PowerPoint using Copilot, a sort of modern-day Clippy<\/a> AI assistant for Microsoft 365. It can be prompted to create presentations or to generate images<\/a> and adjust the tone or format of text within a presentation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n