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.

Office 2004 for Mac

Office 2004 for Mac is a version of Microsoft Office developed for Mac OS X. The software was originally written for PowerPC Macs, so Macs with Intel CPUs must run the program under Mac OS X's Rosetta emulation layer. For this reason, it is not compatible with Mac OS X 10.7 and newer.

Office 2004 was replaced by its successor, Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, which was developed as a universal binary to run natively on Intel Macs. However, Office 2008 did not include support for Visual Basic for Applications, which made Microsoft extend the support period by an additional 27 months for their older Office 2004. Microsoft ultimately shipped support for Visual Basic in Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac, which also dropped PowerPC support altogether.

As of January 10, 2012, support for Office 2004 for Mac has ended: no further updates or support will be provided from Microsoft.

Editions

Microsoft Office for Mac 2004 is available in three editions: Standard, Professional, and Student and Teacher. All three editions include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage. The Professional Edition adds Virtual PC. The Student and Teacher Edition cannot be upgraded, which means when a later version of Office is released, people who purchased the Student and Teacher edition must buy a new package.

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.

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is a version of the Microsoft Office productivity suite for Mac OS X. It supersedes Office 2004 for Mac (which did not have Intel native code) and is the Mac OS X equivalent of Office 2007. Office 2008 was developed by Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit and released on January 15, 2008. Office 2008 was the last version of Office for Mac to support Mac OS X Tiger (10.4.9 or higher) and Macs with a PowerPC processor (G4 or higher) as well as newer Macs with Intel processors. Office 2008 was followed by Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 released on October 26, 2010, requiring a Mac with an Intel processor and Mac OS version 10.5 or later. Office 2008 is also the last version to feature Entourage, which was replaced by Outlook in Office 2011.

Release

Office 2008 was originally slated for release in the second half of 2007; however, it was delayed until January 2008, purportedly to allow time to fix lingering bugs. Office 2008 is the first version of Office for Mac supplied as a Universal Binary.

Windows 10

Windows 10 is a personal computer operating system released by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems. It was officially unveiled in September 2014 following a brief demo at Build 2014. The first version of the operating system entered a public beta testing process in October 2014, leading up to its consumer release on July 29, 2015, and its release to volume licensing on August 1, 2015. To encourage the adoption of Windows 10, Microsoft announced that during its first year of availability, upgrades to the operating system would be made available free of charge to users of genuine copies of eligible editions of Windows 7, and Windows 8 after update to Windows 8.1.

Windows 10 introduces what Microsoft described as a "universal" application architecture; expanding on Metro-style apps, these apps can be designed to run across multiple Microsoft product families with nearly identical code‍—‌including PCs, tablets, smartphones, embedded systems, Xbox One, Surface Hub and HoloLens. The Windows user interface was revised to handle transitions between a mouse-oriented interface and a touchscreen-optimized interface based on available input devices‍—‌particularly on 2-in-1 PCs; both interfaces include an updated Start menu that blends elements of Windows 7's traditional Start menu with the tiles of Windows 8. The first release of Windows 10 also introduces a virtual desktop system, a window and desktop management feature called Task View, the Microsoft Edge web browser, support for fingerprint and face recognition login, new security features for enterprise environments, and DirectX 12 and WDDM 2.0 to improve the operating system's graphics capabilities for games.

Windows 7

Windows 7 (codenamed Vienna, formerly Blackcomb) is a personal computer operating system developed by Microsoft. It is a part of the Windows NT family of operating systems. Windows 7 was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009, less than three years after the release of its predecessor, Windows Vista. Windows 7's server counterpart, Windows Server 2008 R2, was released at the same time.

Windows 7 was primarily intended to be an incremental upgrade to the operating system intending to address Windows Vista's poor critical reception while maintaining hardware and software compatibility. Windows 7 continued improvements on Windows Aero (the user interface introduced in Windows Vista) with the addition of a redesigned taskbar that allows applications to be "pinned" to it, and new window management features. Other new features were added to the operating system, including libraries, the new file sharing system HomeGroup, and support for multitouch input. A new "Action Center" interface was also added to provide an overview of system security and maintenance information, and tweaks were made to the User Account Control system to make it less intrusive. Windows 7 also shipped with updated versions of several stock applications, including Internet Explorer 8, Windows Media Player, and Windows Media Center.