Most people have heard of Microsoft, but in the minds of many it is associated with Windows. Windows is indeed a very important Microsoft product. However, the Microsoft software applications are also of key importance to Microsoft. Several of them have become de facto standards in business and academic environments. We are going to look at a few of the most important ones.

Microsoft was founded in 1975 to sell BASIC interpreters, tools used to develop software applications. It broke into the big time when it went into business with IBM to jointly develop the DOS operating systems used in the early IBM PCs and PC compatible. The partnership with IBM ended with a nasty divorce in less than 10 years, but Microsoft went on to release many versions of Microsoft Windows, which has been the dominant OS on the desktop for many years.

Microsoft started marketing desktop applications during the 80s with some success. Their breakthrough came in 1990 when they announced the collection of office applications called Microsoft Office. The contents of this application suite have shifted over the years, but the basic core applications have stayed the same. Microsoft Office has become a standard in many businesses and other organizations. Following is a brief look at some of the most important applications in Microsoft Office.

Microsoft Word is probably the most commonly used word processing program in the world. The file format that it uses has become a de facto standard. Most word processors and other programs that work with text can read, and often write, files in Microsoft Word format. Word is powerful enough that it can be used for special formatting required in many areas such as medical records and legal documents.

Microsoft Excel is the equivalent of Word in the world of numbers and spreadsheets. The application and its file formats have become standards much like Word. Originally developed for accounting and finance, it is now widely used for any task that requires even minor number crunching. It also has very powerful facility for presenting numerical data in graphical form. It can be used for data management in simple cases where relationships are not significant.

Microsoft Outlook is a popular email client application. It has powerful tools for filtering and organizing email. It can keep track of contact information. It has powerful tools for managing calendars and setting up meetings among multiple Outlook users via shared calendar information.

Microsoft Access is a database management system. It is a rather simple and limited system. It is not really intended to support massive, complex, multiple user databases. It makes it easy for non database professional users to create and manage relatively simple single user databases. This can make the use of simple databases cost effective in cases where the cost of development and support by a database professional would make database usage economically infeasible.

Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation manager. It is mainly used to create slide shows, though the pages it creates can be used for many other things such as graphical diagrams in a word processor document. PowerPoint has become so widely used that it has been a bit controversial at times. People have criticized its over use, arguing that pretty graphics have their place, but natural language explanations of complex situations are sometimes needed.

There are many other Microsoft Software Applications. These are some of the most widely used applications that are included in Office. It is often the case that installing Microsoft Office on a computer provides all or almost all of the applications that will be used on that system.

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Category: Computers and Technology
Keywords: software, computers, technology, business, hardware, programs, system, society