PROVISIONAL PATENT APPLICATIONS: Use and Abuse is the completion of a four-book series on the topic of quality in patents and patent portfolios. This book describes a provisional patent application (PPA), shows how it differs from an ordinary non-provisional application (NPA), and explains how it can provide an early priority date for later applications and patents. There are few formal requirements for a PPA, which can be good in that it gives freedom to explain an invention in the inventor