- #HISTORY OF MICROSOFT OFFICE PACKAGES 32 BIT#
- #HISTORY OF MICROSOFT OFFICE PACKAGES PRO#
- #HISTORY OF MICROSOFT OFFICE PACKAGES SOFTWARE#
- #HISTORY OF MICROSOFT OFFICE PACKAGES PROFESSIONAL#
- #HISTORY OF MICROSOFT OFFICE PACKAGES WINDOWS#
Office 2003 also supported XML across the board and a new application, InfoPath, allowed for the creation of XML driven forms to collect data. Office 2003 gave all office applications the ability to access SharePoint services directly, allowing real collaborative working for the first time. Office now had a Premium edition that included Front0 and PhotoDraw 2000. From an IT perspective, Office 2000 now used an installer that could be customised with service packs. The font list of all applications now showed a preview of the font style, and the open and save dialogs all shared a Places bar that allowed you to access locations easily. Office 2000 saw the introduction of a shared 'clipboard' that could store up to 12 pieces of cut or copied data. Outlook 97 was bundled in all editions for the first time.
#HISTORY OF MICROSOFT OFFICE PACKAGES PROFESSIONAL#
The standard and professional editions were joined by Small Business and Developer editions of Office with additional applications such as Small Business Financial Manager and the Direct Mail Manager. The Office Assistant appeared, which was an animated help system that, although much derided, gave users the ability to enter natural language questions for the first time. Office 97 was a major release and introduced a lot of new features across all the applications, which now had customisable 'command bars' instead of the fixed toolbars and menu of previous releases. At this point Outlook was not part of Office. Office now came in two flavours Standard and Professional, with Professional including the Access database application as well as the usual Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
#HISTORY OF MICROSOFT OFFICE PACKAGES 32 BIT#
All applications in the suite were also upgraded to 32 bit and supported OLE-2, which meant for the first time that all the applications in the suite could talk to each other. The first sign of this was in the application version numbers, with all the applications versions set to 7, to match Word's version, but generally they were known as Word 95, Excel 95 etc. The release of Office 95 finally saw the different applications starting to converge. But with the release of Office 95 that things started to change. Office 3 (there was no Office 2) and Office 4.3 followed in 19 respectively, but these followed the path of the first Office suite, in that the applications were pretty much still standalone. However the applications were consistent with the Microsoft feel, and the success of Office, combined with Windows, allowed Microsoft to become the first company to post sales of over $1billion in 1990. This was really just a marketing strategy, because the separate applications had no real way of talking to each other and no shared facilities such as a common spell checker.
#HISTORY OF MICROSOFT OFFICE PACKAGES WINDOWS#
The first Office suite from Microsoft was released in 1990 as (would you guess) The Microsoft Office, and bundled together Word for Windows 1, Excel for Windows 2 and PowerPoint for Windows 2. But of course, for the user, they were still essentially different applications.
#HISTORY OF MICROSOFT OFFICE PACKAGES PRO#
WordPerfect entered into a licencing agreement with Borland to use Quattro Pro and Paradox in the WordPerfect Office suite. Lotus bought up other companies like Ami Pro and Approach so they could bundle their apps into a suite. Microsoft had a complete set of productivity applications ready to bundle up as a suite, but others did not. An Office Suite is a collection, or bundle, of complimentary products from one or more developers and usually consists of a Word Processor, a Spreadsheet and a Presentations package, but may also have other applications as well such as an email client, database package, web development software, and so on. It was the last reason, the bottom line, that drove the creation of Office Suites in the early 90's.
#HISTORY OF MICROSOFT OFFICE PACKAGES SOFTWARE#
The vendor's perspective is obvious: they want you to use all of their software it's better for the bottom line. We will inevitably find that the applications don't 'talk' to each other as well as we would like, if at all. As users, we need to deal with inconsistencies between the different packages and learn different ways of doing things between applications. This seems like a sensible route, but for the user and the vendor it has disadvantages. You picked the best application to suit your needs. Perhaps you would go for Excel as your spreadsheet of choice, pick WordStar for your word processing needs and Freelance Graphics when you needed a presentation. Back in the olden days (well back in the 80's and early 90's) you could take your pick of applications.