Microsoft Windows was announced by Bill Gates on November 10, 1983, 2 years before it was first released. Microsoft introduced Windows as a graphical user interface for MS-DOS, which had been introduced two years earlier, on August 12, 1981. The product line evolved in the 1990s from an operating environment into a fully complete, modern operating system over two lines of development, each with their own separate codebase.
Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet editor developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS and iPadOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Excel forms part of the Microsoft 365 suite of software.
Microsoft Office, MS Office, or simply Office, is an office suite and family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. The first version of the Office suite, announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988 at COMDEX, contained Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint — all three of which remain core products in Office — and over time Office applications have grown substantially closer with shared features such as a common spell checker, Object Linking and Embedding 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.
Outlook Express, formerly known as Microsoft Internet Mail and News, is a discontinued email and news client included with Internet Explorer versions 3.0 through 6.0. As such, it was bundled with several versions of Microsoft Windows, from Windows 98 to Windows Server 2003, and was available for Windows 3.x, Windows NT 3.51, Windows 95, Mac System 7, Mac OS 8, and Mac OS 9. In Windows Vista, Outlook Express was superseded by Windows Mail.
The Microsoft Windows Script Host (WSH) is an automation technology for Microsoft Windows operating systems that provides scripting abilities comparable to batch files, but with a wider range of supported features. This tool was first provided on Windows 95 after Build 950a on the installation discs as an optional installation configurable and installable by means of the Control Panel, and then a standard component of Windows 98 and subsequent and Windows NT 4.0 Build 1381 and by means of Service Pack 4. The WSH is also a means of automation for Internet Explorer via the installed WSH engines from IE Version 3.0 onwards; at this time VBScript became means of automation for Microsoft Outlook 97. The WSH is also an optional install provided with a VBScript and JScript engine for Windows CE 3.0 and following and some third-party engines including Rexx and other forms of Basic are also available.
The Office Assistant is a discontinued intelligent user interface for Microsoft Office that assisted users by way of an interactive animated character which interfaced with the Office help content. It was included in Microsoft Office, in Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft FrontPage. It had a wide selection of characters to choose from, with the most well known being a paperclip called Clippit. The Office Assistant and particularly Clippit have been the subject of numerous criticisms and parodies.
Windows NT 3.51 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It is the third version of Windows NT and was released on May 30, 1995, eight months following the release of Windows NT 3.5. The most significant enhancement offered in this release was that it provides client/server support for inter-operating with Windows 95, which was released almost three months after NT 3.51. Windows NT 4.0 became its successor a year later. Mainstream support for Windows NT 3.51 Workstation ended on December 31, 2000, and extended support ended on December 31, 2001, while Windows NT 3.51 Server mainstream support ended on September 30, 2000, followed by extended support on September 30, 2002. Both editions were succeeded by Windows NT 4.0 Workstation and Windows NT 4.0 Server, respectively.
Microsoft Project is a project management software product, developed and sold by Microsoft. It is designed to assist a project manager in developing a schedule, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, managing the budget, and analyzing workloads.
Microsoft Office XP is an office suite which was officially revealed in July 2000 by Microsoft for the Windows operating system. Office XP was released to manufacturing on March 5, 2001, and was later made available to retail on May 31, 2001. A Mac OS X equivalent, Microsoft Office v. X was released on November 19, 2001.
Windows Server Essentials is an integrated server suite from Microsoft for businesses with no more than 25 users or 50 devices. It includes Windows Server, Exchange Server, Windows SharePoint Services, and Microsoft Outlook. Application server technologies are tightly integrated to provide and offer management benefits such as integrated setup, enhanced monitoring, Remote Web Workplace, a unified management console, and remote access.
Microsoft Office 2000 is a release of Microsoft Office, an office suite developed and distributed by Microsoft for the Windows family of operating systems. Office 2000 was released to manufacturing on March 29, 1999, and was made available to retail on June 7, 1999. A Mac OS equivalent, Microsoft Office 2001, was released on October 11, 2000.
Quick View is a file viewer in Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 operating systems. The viewer can be used to view practically any file.
This is a history of the various versions of Microsoft Office, consisting of a bundle of several different applications which changed over time. This table only includes final releases and not pre-release or beta software. It also does not list the history of the constituent standalone applications which were released much earlier starting with Word in 1983, Excel in 1985, and PowerPoint in 1987.
Microsoft Office 95 is the fourth major release of the Microsoft Office office suite for Windows systems, released by Microsoft on August 24, 1995. It is the successor to both Office 4.2 and 4.3 and it bumps up the version number of both the suite itself and all its components to 7.0, so that each Office program's number matches the rest. Microsoft Office 95 is supported on Windows 95 or Windows NT 3.51 and later versions of each. It was superseded by Microsoft Office 97 and support ended on December 31, 2001. It is the last version of Microsoft Office to support Windows NT 3.51 RTM–SP4.
Microsoft Office shared tools are software components that are included in all Microsoft Office products.
Microsoft Office 2013 is a version of Microsoft Office, a productivity suite for Microsoft Windows. Unlike with Office 2010, no macOS equivalent was released.
Microsoft Office 2016 is a version of the Microsoft Office productivity suite, succeeding both Office 2013 and Office for Mac 2011 and preceding Office 2019 for both platforms. It was released on macOS on July 9, 2015, and on Microsoft Windows on September 22, 2015, for Office 365 subscribers. Mainstream support ended on October 13, 2020, and extended support for most editions of Office 2016 will end on October 14, 2025. The perpetually licensed version on macOS and Windows was released on September 22, 2015. Office 2016 is compatible with Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 through Windows 11 v23H2 and Windows Server 2022. It also requires OS X Yosemite at the minimum. It is the last version of Microsoft Office to support Windows 7 SP1, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 10 RTM–v1803 and Windows Server 2016.
Microsoft Office 2019 is a version of Microsoft Office for both Windows and Mac. It was unveiled on April 27, 2018, for Microsoft Windows and June 12, 2018, for macOS, and launched on September 24, 2018. Some features that had previously been restricted to Office 365 subscribers are available in this release. Office 2019 retains the same major version number of 16, making it the second perpetual release of Office 16. Unlike other versions of Microsoft Office, Office 2019 will only get two years of extended support, which means that support for Office 2019 will end on October 14, 2025.
