Microsoft Office is Microsoft’s ubiquitous office suite for Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X operating systems.
Microsoft Office made its debut in 1990, with successive releases adding to the suite s primary word processor (Microsoft Word), spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel), and presentation (Microsoft PowerPoint) applications with an e-mail / personal information manager application (Microsoft Outlook), database tool (Microsoft Access), desktop publishing app (Microsoft Publisher), note-taking software (Microsoft OneNote), diagram and flowcharting tools (Microsoft Visio) and more.
Microsoft Office dominates the office suite market, but it has faced stronger competition recently in the form of open source office suites like Google Apps for Business, OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. In addition to being available in the traditional desktop-based form, Microsoft now also offers versions of Microsoft Office through the cloud (Office 365) as well as through mobile devices using Microsoft s Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 (Microsoft Office Mobile).
Microsoft Office s most recent releases are Office 2010 for Microsoft Windows, which debuted on June 15, 2010, and Office 2011 for Apple Mac OS X, which was released on October 26, 2010. Microsoft is currently developing the next major release of Office, Microsoft Office 2013, with an expected release date in late 2012, at about the same time as the debut of Windows 8.
