Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office is a series of suites of productivity programs by Microsoft.

They have generally included:

Word word processor,
Excel spreadsheet,
Outlook Personal information manager and communication software
PowerPoint presentation software,

They have sometimes also included:

Access database manager
Microsoft Entourage Personal information manager and communication software for Apple Macintosh only
Microsoft Publisher Desktop publishing software
Microsoft FrontPage web design software
Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser
Microsoft Visio diagram software
Microsoft Project project manager
Microsoft MapPoint mapping software

Beginning with the 1997 edition, Microsoft Agent (in 2000 and up) and a similar actor technology (in 97) have been used to provide the Office Assistant, sometimes dubbed "Clippy" or "Clippit", an interactive help tool.

Table of contents

1 Versions
2 Competitors
3 External links

Versions

Major Microsoft Windows versions include:

Office 4.3 (The last 16-bit version; Word 6.0, etc.)
Office 95 (Word 95, etc.)
Office 97 (Word 97, etc.)
Office 2000 (Word 2000, etc.)
Office XP (Word 2002, etc.)
Office 2003 (Word 2003, etc.) - released October 21, 2003

There have been variants of the later versions such as Small Business Edition, Professional Edition and Developer Edition with slightly different collections of applications.

Apple Macintosh versions include:

Office 1 (Word 3, etc.)
Office 2 (Word 4, etc.)
Office 3 (Word 5, etc.)
Office 4.2 (The first Power Mac-aware version; Word 6.0, etc.)
Office 98 (Word 98, etc.)
Office 2001 (Word 2001, etc.)
Office v.X (Word X, etc.)
Office 2004 (Word 2004, etc.)

Competitors

GNOME Office (open source)
KOffice (open source)
OpenOffice (open source)
StarOffice (commercial "snapshot" of OpenOffice, combined with proprietary and third-party code modules)
WPS Office (Chinese)