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A Slightly More Detailed History of Microsoft Office I notice that often, people have a difficult time distinguishing between different versions of Microsoft Office products. Here's a brief explanation of the differences between the various versions. This is just on my experience and what's published by Microsoft; I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong. I also have a brief comparison of Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows products, as well as a more extensive history of Microsoft Windows products. MICROSOFT OFFICE PRODUCTS IN GENERAL Microsoft Office is a suite of business-oriented programs which feature (primarily) Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access. There are Microsoft Office versions for both Windows and Mac. There are various versions of the Microsoft Office suite (at varying costs, of course), and so not all of the core components are bundled with each version. For example, you may have Office 2000 Standard which does not include Access. Generally, Access is bundled with the "Professional" edition of the Office software, while Publisher and FrontPage are bundled with the "Premium" or "Developer" editions.
TABLE OF MICROSOFT OFFICE SUITES The following table details the version name of each MS Office suite, the release date of the package, and shows which version of each component (Word, Excel, etc.) is included in each release version. If there is no version number under a component column, then that component isn't included in that release. The order is most recent to oldest. (There is some missing data here; if you can help me fill it in, I'd appreciate it!)
Microsoft originally numbered its Office suite with general version numbers (i.e. 2.0, 3.0, and so on), but switched to using the year that the suite was released as its version number -- just like Windows. (As with Windows, the exception is the XP version.) In general, the release version of the Office suite corresponds to the Word version for that suite. You'll note that Word jumped from version 2 to version 6 when it went from Office 3 to Office 4. This was because Microsoft was competing with WordPerfect at the time, and it wanted to show that it had a jump on WordPerfect. WordPerfect at the time was version 5.1, so Microsoft bumped Word up to version 6.0 to show it was superior. TABLE OF MICROSOFT OFFICE SUITES (MAC VERSIONS) I'll bet most Windows users don't realize that Microsoft makes its Office products for the Mac, too! Well, most of them, anyway. Notably absent is Outlook, which is essentially replaced by Entourage in the Mac Office suites.
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