30 Million or a Billion PowerPoint Slides?

Since 2001, we have heard the 30 million figure as the number of PowerPoint presentations created each day. Now it has been 15 years, and no one has provided a new, updated number—but someone did provide a number that was largely unnoticed as the figure was a passing reference in a keynote that spoke about so much more.

During Microsoft's Build 2015 event, Satya Nadella said:

This fundamental change that we are making to Office; this fundamental platform shift of Office, where the users—the 1 billion plus users of Office are available to you as developers.

The slide at that time mentioned that Office has 1.5 billion users.


Now certainly this does not mean that PowerPoint also has 1 billion plus or 1.5 billion users. But it does mean that PowerPoint could be installed in many of those devices. And this figure is not the number of presentations created each day, but the number of PowerPoint and Office installations.

If you want to hear the entire keynote, here is an embed. Go to 1:28:49 to hear the part where Satya talks about "the one billion plus users of Office."

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