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The History of Slide Sizes in PowerPoint

Ever since I found out you can tweak the slide size in PowerPoint, I’ve been itching to know why it defaults to 19.05 × 33.867 cm (7.5 × 13.333 in). What really baffled me was that the width is specified to the thousandth of a centimetre—such precision! But why? To crack this puzzle, let’s hop back to 1987. What a year! The first Starbucks outside the US opened in Vancouver; Margaret Thatcher sat down for an interview on Soviet TV; The Simpsons made its debut; Mathias Rust landed his Cessna 172 “Skyhawk” on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge; Nike unveiled the Air Max trainers; and in Silicon Valley, Photoshop and PowerPoint saw their first versions released.

The Nineties

PowerPoint 1.0 first hit the Mac in 1987, but didn’t arrive on Windows until 1990. Not only is it a cornerstone of my work—it’s exactly my age, too. Thirty-five years ago, presentations were pulled together in all sorts of ways; Visme did a cracking deep-dive on this, but we’ll stick to the overhead projector (aka codoscope or graph-projector). Slides for those talks were painstakingly hand-drawn onto transparent sheets, designs cost a right bundle, and trying to tweak anything half an hour before showtime was simply out of the question. Golden days, indeed.
© 2016 Computer History Museum. “PowerPoint Demonstration: Overhead Projectors.” YouTube video, uploaded September 13, 2016. PowerPoint’s debut shifted the paradigm. Although slides remained analogue for quite a while and PowerPoint simply made their creation easier, only a few years stood between us and a full digital takeover and the complete democratisation of the process. Take a look at the very first icons—the slide is sketched by hand. The evolution of the PowerPoint icon. Author: Vlad Bugaev (pptxman). Those sheets were known as transparencies, viewfoils or viewgraphs. Each measured 8.5 × 11 inches. Below are a couple of references from different years: © 1961 United States. Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service (Park Practice Program) and National Park Service. Grist. The Service. Digitized November 5, 2010. https://books.google.ru/books?id=TZ3F1OYZdEcC. © National Security Agency. “A Snapshot in Time: ‘Vu-Graphs’.” NSA, March 27, 2018. It seems slide sizes might have varied slightly from one projector to another, or perhaps PowerPoint added print margins—but from 1987 until about 2010 the default was an inch smaller: 7.5 × 10 in (19.05 × 25.4 cm). In fact, PowerPoint’s slide dimensions were inherited directly from the analogue overhead-projector transparencies.

The 2000s

Aspect ratio describes the relationship between a screen’s horizontal and vertical units. In the Eighties and Nineties 4:3 ruled supreme, but in the 2000s screens gradually began to widen—or perhaps flatten? Either way, by the decade’s end 16:9 had become the norm. Microsoft Office figured it was high time slides followed suit. The new 16:9 slide size was set at 14.29 × 25.4 cm—trimming off 4.76 cm vertically. In PowerPoint 2010, they officially rolled out a dedicated widescreen slide format. In PowerPoint 2010, they officially rolled out a dedicated widescreen slide format.

The 2010s

In 2013, Microsoft had a change of heart and opted to widen its slides; they restored the vertical dimension to 19.5 cm and added 9.737 cm to the width. Those thousandths? They stem from the 16:9 aspect ratio. Ever since, slide size has settled at 19.05 × 33.867 cm (7.5 × 13.333 in). With PowerPoint 2013, the choice was made not to pare back the original height but to stretch the canvas horizontally. Hope you found that as fascinating as I did.  #medium #powerpoint #2k22