Office 97

Microsoft Office is a suite of productivity programs created or purchased by Microsoft and developed for Microsoft Windows, and Apple Computer's Mac OS and Mac OS X operating systems. more...

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As well as the core office applications, the Microsoft Office brand includes associated servers and Web-based services. Recent versions of Office are now called the "Office system" rather than the "Office suite" to reflect the fact that they include servers as well.

Office made its first appearance in 1989 on the Macintosh, with a version for Windows following it in 1990. It was initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications that were previously marketed and sold separately. The main selling point was that buying the bundle was substantially cheaper than buying each of the individual applications on their own. The first version of Office contained Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Additionally, a "Pro" version of Office included Microsoft Access and Schedule Plus. Over the years the Office applications have grown substantially closer together from a technical standpoint, sharing features such as a common spell checker, OLE data integration, and the Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications scripting language. Microsoft also positions Office as a development platform for line-of-business software.

The current versions are Office 2003 for Windows, launched October 21, 2003, and Office 2004 for Macintosh, released May 19, 2004. Office 2007, the next version for Windows, was announced on February 15, 2006, was released on November 30, 2006 for businesses via the Volume Licence and MSDN channels, and will be on general release to the public in January 2007. It features a radically different user interface and a new XML-based primary file format.

It competes with other commercial software Office suites from IBM and Corel, as well as free open-source alternatives, such as OpenOffice.org.

Common Office programs

These programs are included in all editions of Microsoft Office 2003, except Microsoft Office Basic Edition 2003. Microsoft Office Basic Edition includes Word, Excel and Outlook only.

Word

Microsoft Word is a word processor and is considered to be the main program of Office. It possesses a dominant market share in the word processor market. Its proprietary DOC format is considered a de facto standard, although its most recent version, Word 11.0/2003, also supports an XML-based format. Word is also available in some editions of Microsoft Works. It is available for the Windows and Macintosh platforms.

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