What is Microsoft Office?

Microsoft Office is an office suite of interrelated desktopapplications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS Xoperating systems. Microsoft Office was introduced by Microsoft in 1989 for Mac OS, with a version for Windows in1990. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of Office contained MicrosoftWord, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Additionally, a "Pro" (Professional) version of Office included Microsoft Access andSchedule Plus. Over the years, Office applications have grown substantially closer with shared features such as a common spell checker, OLE data integration and Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications scripting language. Microsoft also positions Office as a development platform for line-of-business software under the Office Business Applications (OBA) brand. The current versions are Office 2007 for Windows which was released on January 30,2007, and Office 2008 for Mac OS X, released January 15, 2008. Office 2007/Office 2008 introduced a new user interface and new Office Open XML document formats (docx, xlsx, pptx). Consequently, Microsoft has made available, free of charge, an add-on known as the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack to allow Office 2000-2003 for Windows and Office 2004 for Mac editions to open, edit, and save documents created under the new formats for Office 2007. According to Forrester Research, as of June 2009, some version of Microsoft Office is used in 80% of enterprises and the latest Office versions hold roughly 80% of thoseinstallations.