Dear Eddie Liu,
Thanks for writing about the meaning of "PPT".
"PPT" is not properly an acronym for PowerPoint, because
"Acronyms ... are abbreviations that are formed using the initial components in a phrase or name. These components may be individual letters (as in CEO) or parts of words (as in Benelux or Delmarva)."
--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym
An acronym can be formed by taking the initial letters of multiple words, sometimes only the important words, for example
BBC: British Broadcasting Corporation
CNN: Cable News Network
USA: United States of America
(there are other types as well).
So an acronym is a special kind of abbreviation formed from initial components such as letters, and "PPT" was not made up that way. (All acronyms are abbreviations, but most abbreviations are not acronyms.) The need for the abbreviation "PPT" came about in this way. In Microsoft's early MS-DOS system and later in Windows, every filename ended in a dot (".") followed by a short "file type". (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_file_types.) In MS-DOS in the 1970s, and then in early versions of Windows built on MS-DOS, the file type had to be only 3 letters. A filename had a maximum of 8 letters, then the dot, then a 3-letter file type, so this naming format was called "8+3". When PowerPoint was invented, we had to decide on a 3-letter abbreviation to identify its files to the operating system.
Even though PowerPoint was developed first for Macintosh, we knew from the very beginning that the most important target would be Microsoft Windows, so we planned for it all along. In English, abbreviations of single words are often formed by taking the first letter of the word and the last letter of the word, adding between them the most important letters from the middle to show what the word sounds like.
For example, MR: mister
JR: junior
DR: doctor
REVD: reverend
MGMT: management
We made "PPT" as an abbreviation for PowerPoint, by taking the first 'P" and the last "T", adding between them the middle "P": PowerPoinT. This was natural, because in English "power" is a common word all by itself, and "point" is a common word all by itself, so people understand "PowerPoint" as a combination of the two words--further indicated by the fact that we capitalized both "P"s.
"PPT" was a natural English abbreviation for the word "PowerPoint" and it was the right length (3 letters) to be an MS-DOS file type.
As to the others, any computer program deals with many types of files. Each file type required a different 3-letter abbreviation. We made up other file types by making them similar to "PPT"--for instance, "PPS" for "PowerPoint Show". Since they all start with "P", you can sort a list of files by their file types and find all the ones for the PowerPoint program sorted together.
Much later (as you say, starting with PowerPoint 2007), Microsoft introduced new files formats, the XML-based formats. By this time, file types could be longer than 3 characters because the foundations of Windows had been entirely rewritten. For example, in early versions of Windows, HTML files could only have the file type "HTM" ("index.htm"), but now you often see HTML files of file type "HTML" ("index.html").
Microsoft used this freedom to make 4-letter file types for the new formats, by using the old file types ("PPT", "PPS") and adding an "X" (from "XML"), resulting in new file types "PPTX", "PPSX" and so forth. This way you can look at a listing of one of the new files and see instantly that it is, for example, "the XML revision of a PPT file".
I hope this explains how "PPT" came about.
Best regards,
Robert Gaskins
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