Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office is an office suite of applications, servers, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of Office contained Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Over the years, Office applications have grown substantially closer with shared features such as a common spell checker, OLE data integration and Visual Basic for Applications scripting language. Microsoft also positions Office as a development platform for line-of-business software under the Office Business Applications brand.

On 10 July 2012, Softpedia reported that Office is used by over a billion people worldwide.

The desktop version of Office is available for Windows and OS X. A touch-optimised version of Microsoft Office is available pre-installed on Windows RT tablets. A mobile version of Office, Office Mobile, is available for free on Windows Phone, iOS and Android. A web-based version of Office, Office Online, is also available. Microsoft has stated that it plans to create a version of Office for "other popular platforms" as well.

Microsoft Office 97

Microsoft Office 97 was a major milestone release of Microsoft Office, which included hundreds of new features and improvements, introduced "Command Bars", a paradigm in which menus and toolbars were made more similar in capability and visual design featured natural language systems and sophisticated grammar checking. It was published on CD-ROM as well as on a set of 44 3½-inch floppy disks, and became Y2K safe with Service Release 2. Released on November 19, 1996, it was the last version to support Windows NT 3.51 on i386 and Alpha (only Word and Excel were available for the Alpha). Two service releases (SR-1 and SR-2) were released for Office 97.

Microsoft Office 97 is notable as the first version of Office to feature the Office Assistant, a feature initially designed to assist users by the way of an interactive animated character, which interfaced with the Office help content. The default assistant was Clippit, nicknamed Clippy, a paperclip. The office assistant feature would continue to be available in Office versions up until and including Microsoft Office 2003. In Office XP the feature was hidden by default and not installed by default in Office 2003.

Microsoft Office 2013

Microsoft Office 2013 (codenamed Office 15) is a version of Microsoft Office, a productivity suite for Microsoft Windows. It is the successor to Microsoft Office 2010 and the predecessor to Microsoft Office 2016. It includes extended file format support, user interface updates and support for touch among its new features. Office 2013 is suitable for IA-32 and x64 systems and requires Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 or a later version of either. A version of Office 2013 comes included on Windows RT devices. Mainstream support ends on April 10, 2018. Extended support ends on April 11, 2023.

Development on this version of Microsoft Office was started in 2010 and ended on October 11, 2012, when Microsoft Office 2013 was released to manufacturing. Microsoft released Office 2013 to general availability on January 29, 2013. This version includes new features such as integration support for online services (including OneDrive, Outlook.com, Skype, Yammer and Flickr), improved format support for Office Open XML (OOXML), OpenDocument (ODF) and Portable Document Format (PDF) and support for multi-touch interfaces.