Microsoft Office is a suite of productivity programs developed for originally, Windows and later
for Apple Mac OS operating systems.
Office first made its appearance in the early-1990s, and was initially a marketing term for a
bundled set of applications that were previously marketed and sold separately. The main selling
point was that buying the bundle was substantially cheaper than buying each of the individual
applications on their own. The first version of Office contained Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Additionally, a "Pro" version of Office included Microsoft Access and Schedule Plus. Over the
years the Office applications have grown substantially closer together from a technical
standpoint, sharing features such as a common spell checker, OLE data integration, and the
Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) scripting language.
As of 2006, Office is the most popular office suite on the Windows and Macintosh operating
systems and considered to be the de facto standard for word processing, spreadsheet, and
presentation documents.
Each individual application can be used to make everyday tasks as automatic as possible,
and when combined a powerful office tool to make your office efficient.