When was Microsoft Office introduced?
19001#8
In 1990, Microsoft introduced its office suite, Microsoft Office. The suite bundled separate productivity applications, such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. On May 22, Microsoft launched Windows 3.0, featuring streamlined user interface graphics and improved protected mode capability for the Intel 386 processor. Both Office and Windows became dominant in their respective areas.
Microsoft
20288#0
Microsoft Office is a family of client software, server software, 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 an office suite (bundled set of productivity 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 July 10, 2012, Softpedia reported that Office is used by over a billion people worldwide.
Microsoft Office
4240094#15
Meanwhile, Microsoft began introducing its most prominent office products. Microsoft Works, an integrated office program which combined features typically found in a word processor, spreadsheet, database and other office applications, saw its first release as an application for the Apple Macintosh towards the end of 1986. Microsoft Works would later be sold with other Microsoft products including Microsoft Word and Microsoft Bookshelf, a reference collection introduced in 1987 that was the company's first CD-ROM product. Later, on August 8, 1989, Microsoft introduced its most successful office product, Microsoft Office. Unlike the model of Microsoft Works, Microsoft Office was a bundle of separate office productivity applications, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and so forth. While Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office were mostly developed internally, Microsoft also continued its trend of rebranding products from other companies, such as Microsoft SQL Server on January 13, 1988, a relational database management system for companies that was based on technology licensed from Sybase.
History of Microsoft
20288#41
Microsoft Office XP (Office 10.0 or Office 2002) was released in conjunction with Windows XP, and was a major upgrade with numerous enhancements and changes over Office 2000. Office XP introduced the Safe Mode feature, which allows applications such as Outlook to boot when it might otherwise fail by bypassing a corrupted registry or a faulty add-in. Smart tag is a technology introduced with Office XP in Word and Excel and discontinued in Office 2010. Office XP includes integrated voice command and text dictation capabilities, as well as handwriting recognition. It was the first version to require Microsoft Product Activation worldwide and in all editions as an anti-piracy measure, which attracted widespread controversy. Product Activation remained absent from Office for Mac releases until it was introduced in Office 2011 for Mac.
Microsoft Office
1290145#30
Office XP introduced an optional subscription-based activation model that allowed consumers to annually license the product and receive incremental updates at a reduced price when compared with the cost of a full retail version. Microsoft originally intended to deliver the activation model to United States customers after the retail availability of Office XP on May 31, 2001, but later decided to make it available to consumers in "a few select locations" instead, citing a more cautious delivery approach. In spite of this, Microsoft distributed optical media and a single subscription to authorized U.S. retail partners who attended "teamMicrosoft Live!" events. As part of a pilot experiment, consumers in Australia, France, and New Zealand could purchase a subscription for Office XP starting in May 2001; the worldwide release of the activation model was contingent on the success of the pilot experiment, but Microsoft terminated support for subscriptions in 2002 based on feedback and research that demonstrated it was not well understood by consumers. Office 365, released over a decade after Office XP, reintroduced subscription-based licenses to consumers.
Microsoft Office XP
20288#53
Microsoft Office for Mac was introduced for Mac OS in 1989, before Office was released for Windows. It included Word 4.0, Excel 2.2, PowerPoint 2.01, and Mail 1.37. It was originally a limited-time promotion but later became a regular product. With the release of Office on CD-ROM later that year, Microsoft became the first major Mac publisher to put its applications on CD-ROM.
Microsoft Office
20288#58
Microsoft Office 2001 was launched in 2000 as the last Office suite for the classic Mac OS. It required a PowerPC processor. This version introduced Entourage, an e-mail client that included information management tools such as a calendar, an address book, task lists and notes.
Microsoft Office v. X was released in 2001 and was the first version of Microsoft Office for Mac OS X. Support for Office v. X ended on January 9, 2007 after the release of the final update, 10.1.9 Office v.X includes Word X, Excel X, PowerPoint X, Entourage X, MSN Messenger for Mac and Windows Media Player 9 for Mac; it was the last version of Office for Mac to include Internet Explorer for Mac.
Microsoft Office
351190#3
Microsoft Product Activation was introduced in the Brazilian version of Microsoft Office 97 Small Business Edition and Microsoft Word 97 sold in the Hungarian market. It broadened that successful pilot with the release of Microsoft Publisher 98 in the Brazilian market. Microsoft then rolled out product activation in its flagship Microsoft Office 2000 product. All retail copies sold in Australia, Brazil, China, France, and New Zealand, and some sold in Canada and the United States, required the user to activate the product via the Internet. However, all copies of Office 2000 do not require activation after April 15, 2003. After its success, the product activation system was extended worldwide and incorporated into Windows XP and Office XP and all subsequent versions of Windows and Office. Despite independently developing its own technology, in April 2009 a jury found Microsoft to have willfully infringed Uniloc's patent. However, in September 2009, US District Judge William Smith "vacated" the jury's verdict and ruled in favour of Microsoft. This ruling was subsequently overturned in 2011.
Product activation
45187572#13
The user interface design of Office 2016 for Windows is relatively unchanged from its predecessor, Microsoft Office 2013. It retains the flat design that was introduced along with the Metro design language, albeit with a few modifications to the layout, in order to conform with the design of Microsoft Office Mobile. When Office 2016 was released, it came with three themes. The default theme, known as "colorful", features a solid color on the top band of the ribbon, corresponding to the color of the Office application being used, for example, a solid dark blue is featured prominently in Microsoft Word. The theme had been described as useful in making the tab headings more distinct. In addition, both the "white" and "dark grey" themes from Office 2013 are available as well, though no new backgrounds have been added, nor have any existing backgrounds been removed. A fourth "black" theme was added as part of an update in January 2016. The update was not released to users of the traditional editions.
Microsoft Office 2016
9505777#13
On November 17, 2010, Microsoft invited a select number of testers at the Microsoft Connect web portal to test the beta release of SP1. SP1 was officially released by Microsoft on June 27, 2011 and included compatibility, performance, security, and stability improvements. SP1 is a cumulative update that includes all previous updates, as well as fixes exclusive to its release; a list of exclusive fixes was released by Microsoft. SP1 also introduced additional features for Access, Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word. As examples, OneNote 2010 SP1 introduced the ability to open notebooks stored in OneDrive directly from within the app itself, while Outlook 2010 SP1 introduced Office 365 support. With its release, the use of Office Online in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 9 was officially supported by Microsoft for the first time.
Microsoft Office 2010
2778881#0
Microsoft Office 97 is a major milestone release of Microsoft Office, which includes hundreds of new features and improvements over its predecessor, Microsoft Office 95. Office 97 introduced "Command Bars," a paradigm in which menus and toolbars were made more similar in capability and visual design. It also 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. Released on November 19, 1996,the suite runs on Windows NT 3.51 SP5, Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0 SP2, Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows ME. It is the last version to support Windows NT 3.51 as Office 2000 requires Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0 SP3 or a later version. Two service releases (SR-1 and SR-2) were released for Office 97. SR-2 solved the year 2000 problem in Office 97.
Microsoft Office 97