Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word 2003 running on Windows XP Media Center Edition.
Maintainer:	Microsoft
Latest release:	2003 for Windows, 2004 for Mac OS X / October 2003 (Windows), May 2004 (Mac)
OS:	Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows
Use:	Word processor
License:	Proprietary EULA
Website:	www.microsoft.com

Microsoft Word is a word processing application from Microsoft. It was originally written by Richard Brodie for IBM PCs running DOS in 1983. Later versions were created for the Apple Macintosh (1984), SCO UNIX, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows (1989). It became part of the Microsoft Office suite. Image File history File links Winword_2003. ... Image File history File links Microsoft_Word_2003. ... A typical Windows XP MCE 2005 Menu Windows XP Media Center Edition (codename eHome) is a version of Windows XP designed to serve as a home-entertainment hub. ... Software maintenance is one of the activities in software engineering, and is the process of enhancing and optimizing deployed software (software release), as well as remedying defects. ... Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, SEHK: 4338) is an American multinational computer technology corporation that has global annual sales of over 41. ... A software release is to create a new version of the system or program and release it to the user community. ... An operating system (OS) is an essential software program that manages the hardware and software resources of a computer. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Microsoft Windows is a series of proprietary operating environments and operating systems created by Microsoft for use on personal computers and servers. ... A word processor (also more formally known as a document preparation system) is a computer application used for the production (including composition, editing, formatting, and possibly printing) of any sort of viewable or printed material. ... A software license is a type of proprietary or gratuitous license as well as a memorandum of contract between a producer and a user of computer software — sometimes called an End User License Agreement (EULA) — that specifies the perimeters of the permission granted by the owner to the user. ... Proprietary software is software that has restrictions on using and copying it, usually enforced by a proprietor. ... A software license is a type of proprietary or gratiuitious license as well as a memorandum of contract between a producer and a user of computer software — sometimes called an End User License Agreement (EULA) — that specifies the perimeters of the permission granted by the owner to the user. ... This page as shown in the aol 9. ... A word processor (also more formally known as a document preparation system) is a computer application used for the production (including composition, editing, formatting, and possibly printing) of any sort of viewable or printed material. ... Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, SEHK: 4338) is an American multinational computer technology corporation that has global annual sales of over 41. ... Richard Brodie is the original author of Microsoft Word. ... IBM PC (IBM 5150) with keyboard and green screen monochrome monitor (IBM 5151), running MS-DOS 5. ... ‹ The template below has been proposed for deletion. ... The first Macintosh computer, introduced in 1984, upgraded to a 512K Fat Mac. The Macintosh, or Mac, is a line of personal computers designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple Computer. ... SCO OpenServer, previously SCO UNIX and SCO ODT, is a Unix-like computer operating system developed by Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) and now maintained by the SCO Group. ... OS/2 is an operating system created by Microsoft and IBM and later developed by IBM exclusively. ... Microsoft Windows is a series of proprietary operating environments and operating systems created by Microsoft for use on personal computers and servers. ... Microsoft Office is a suite of productivity programs created by Microsoft and developed for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh operating systems. ...

Word's first general release was for MS-DOS computers on May 2, 1983. It was not well received, and sales lagged behind those of rival products such as WordPerfect. Microsofts disk operating system, MS-DOS, was Microsofts implementation of DOS, which was the first popular operating system for the IBM PC, and until recently, was widely used on the PC compatible platform. ... May 2 is the 122nd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (123rd in leap years). ... 1983 (MCMLXXXIII) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A screenshot of WordPerfect X3 running on Windows XP WordPerfect was also the name of a road bicycle racing team. ...

Although MS-DOS was a character-based system, Word for DOS was the first word processor for the IBM PC that showed typeface markups such as bold and italics directly on the screen while editing, although this was not a true WYSIWYG system. Other DOS word processors, such as WordStar and WordPerfect, used simple text-only display with markup codes on the screen or sometimes, at the most, alternative colors. A word processor (also more formally known as a document preparation system) is a computer application used for the production (including composition, editing, formatting, and possibly printing) of any sort of viewable or printed material. ... International Business Machines Corporation (IBM, or colloquially, Big Blue; NYSE: IBM) is a computer technology firm headquartered in Armonk, NY, USA. The company, which was founded in 1888 and incorporated June 15, 1911, manufactures and sells computer hardware, software, infrastructure services, hosting services, and consulting services. ... A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia. ... WYSIWYG (pronounced //), is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, used in computing to describe a system in which content during editing appears very similar to the final product. ... A word processor (also more formally known as a document preparation system) is a computer application used for the production (including composition, editing, formatting, and possibly printing) of any sort of viewable or printed material. ... WordStar was a word processor application, published by MicroPro, originally written for the CP/M operating system but later ported to DOS, that enjoyed a dominant market share during the early-to-mid-1980s. ... A screenshot of WordPerfect X3 running on Windows XP WordPerfect was also the name of a road bicycle racing team. ...

However, as with most DOS software, each program had its own, often complicated, set of commands for performing functions that had to be learned (for example, in Word for DOS, a file would be saved with the sequence Escape-T-S; the only similar interface belonged to Microsoft's own Multiplan spreadsheet), and as most secretaries had learned how to use WordPerfect, companies were reluctant to switch to a rival product that offered few advantages. Categories: Computer stubs | Spreadsheets | Domain-specific programming languages | Numerical programming languages ...

Many concepts and ideas were brought from Bravo, the original GUI word processor developed at Xerox PARC, to the original Mac version, which was the first Word version to use a graphical user interface, and the later Word for Windows. Bravo's creator Charles Simonyi left PARC to work for Microsoft in 1981. Simonyi hired Brodie, who had worked with him on Bravo, away from PARC that summer. It has been suggested that Look and feel be merged into this article or section. ... Charles Simonyi (Hungarian: Simonyi Károly) is a computer software developer, who, as head of Microsofts application software group, oversaw the creation of Microsofts flagship applications. ... Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was a flagship research division of the Xerox Corporation, based in Palo Alto, California, USA, which essentially created the modern personal computer paper paradigm. ...

Word for Macintosh was written to match the Mac's user interface, and as such it had little in common with Word for DOS; it eventually became the source for Word for Windows 1.0. After Word for Mac was released in 1985, it gained wide acceptance: like other Mac software, Word for Mac was a true what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor. There was no Word 2.0 for Macintosh; this was the first attempt to synchronize version numbers across platforms. WYSIWYG (pronounced //), is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, used in computing to describe a system in which content during editing appears very similar to the final product. ...

The second release of Word for Macintosh, named Word 3.0, was shipped in 1987. It included numerous internal enhancements and new features but was plagued with bugs. Within a few months Word 3.0 was superseded by Word 3.01, which was much more stable. All registered users of 3.0 were mailed free copies of 3.01, making this one of Microsoft's most expensive mistakes up to that time. Word 4.0, released in 1989, was a very successful and solid product.

Word 1990 to 1995

Microsoft Word 6.0 (Windows 98)

The first version of Word for Windows was released in 1989 at a price of 500 US dollars. With the release of Windows 3.0 the following year, sales began to pick up (Word for Windows 1.0 was designed for use with Windows 3.0, and its performance was poorer with the versions of Windows available when it was first released). The failure of WordPerfect to produce a Windows version proved a fatal mistake. It was version 2.0 of Word, however, that firmly established Microsoft Word as the market leader. Microsoft Word 6. ... Microsoft Word 6. ... Windows 98 (codename Memphis) is a graphical operating system released on June 25, 1998 by Microsoft. ... A typical Windows 3. ...

Word for Macintosh never had any serious rivals, although programs such as Nisus Writer provided features such as non-contiguous selection which were not added until Word 2002 in Office XP. In addition, many users complained that major updates reliably came two years apart; too long for most business users at that time. Word 5.1 for the Macintosh, released in 1991, was a popular word processor due to its elegance, relative ease of use, and feature set. However, version 6.0 for the Macintosh, released in 1994, was widely derided. It was the first version of Word based on a common codebase between the Windows and Mac versions; many accused it of being slow, clumsy and memory intensive. The Windows version was numbered 6.0 to coordinate product naming across platforms, despite the fact that the previous version was Word for Windows 2.0. The first Macintosh computer, introduced in 1984, upgraded to a 512K Fat Mac. The Macintosh, or Mac, is a line of personal computers designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple Computer. ... Nisus Writer - Wikipedia /**/ @import /skins/monobook/IE50Fixes. ...

Word 6.0 was the second attempt to develop a common codebase version of Word. The first, code-named Pyramid, was an attempt to completely rewrite the existing Word product. It was abandoned when it was determined that it would take the development team too long to rewrite and then catch up with all the new capabilities that could have been added in the same time without a rewrite. Proponents of Pyramid claimed it would have been faster, smaller, and more stable than the product that was eventually released for Macintosh, which was essentially just Word for Windows running on a Windows simulation layer. Pyramid would have been truly cross-platform, with machine-independent application code and a small mediation layer between the application and the operating system. More recent versions of Word for Macintosh are no longer based on Word for Windows although code is often appropriated from the Windows version for the Macintosh version.

Later versions of Word have more capabilities than just word processing. The Drawing tool allows simple desktop publishing operations such as adding graphics to documents. Collaboration, document comparison, multilingual support, translation and many other capabilities have been added over the years. Desktop publishing (also known as DTP) combines a personal computer, page layout software and a printer to create publications on a small economic scale. ...

The present

Microsoft Word 2004 (Mac OS X v10.4 "Tiger")

Image File history File links Download high resolution version (1024x768, 323 KB)Microsoft Word 2004 running on Mac OS X Tiger File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Image File history File links Download high resolution version (1024x768, 323 KB)Microsoft Word 2004 running on Mac OS X Tiger File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Mac OS X version 10. ...

File formats

Word document format is now the de facto standard of document file format. Though usually just referred to as "Word document format", this term refers primarily to the format used by default in Word version 97-2003. In addition to the default Word binary format, there are actually a number of optional alternate file formats that Microsoft has used over the years. Rich Text Format (RTF) was an early effort to create a format for interchanging formatted text between applications. RTF remains an optional format for Word that retains all formatting and content of the original document. Later, after HTML appeared, Word supported HTML as an additional full-fidelity roundtrip format similar to RTF, with the additional capability that the file could be viewed in a web browser. Word 2007 (currently in beta) uses the new Office Open XML format as its default format, but retains the older Word 97-2003 format as an option. It also supports (for output only) PDF and XPS format, which is much like an open-source PDF system. De facto is a Latin expression that means in fact or in practice. It is commonly used as opposed to de jure (meaning by law) when referring to matters of law or governance or technique (such as standards), that are found in the common experience as created or developed without... A document file format is a binary file format for storing documents on a storage media, especially for use by computers. ... The Rich Text Format (often abbreviated to RTF) is a document file format that has been continually developed by Microsoft since 1987 for cross-platform document interchange. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... The XML Paper Specification (XPS, formerly codenamed Metro) describes the XPS Document format. ...

The document formats of the various versions of Word change in subtle and not so subtle ways; formatting created in newer versions does not always survive when viewed in older versions of the program, nearly always because that capability does not exist in the previous version. Wordart also changed drastically in a recent version causing documents that used it to get messed up when moving in either direction. The DOC format of Word 97 was publicly documented by Microsoft, but later versions have been kept private, available only to partners, governments and institutions.

People who don't use MS Office sometimes find it difficult to use a Word document. Various solutions have been created. Since the format is the de-facto standard, many word processors such as AbiWord or OpenOffice.org need file import and export filters for Microsoft Word's document file format to compete. Furthermore, there is Apache Jakarta POI, which is an open-source Java library that aims to read and write Word's binary file. Most of this interoperability is achieved through reverse engineering since documentation of the file format, while available to partners, is not openly available. For the last 10 years Microsoft has also made available free viewer programs that can read Word documents without a full version of the MS Word software. [1] AbiWord is a free word processing program under the GPL which runs on Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, ReactOS, SkyOS, BeOS and other operating systems. ... OpenOffice. ... POI, a sub-project of the Apache Jakarta Project, provides pure Java libraries for reading and writing files in Microsoft Office formats, such as Word and Excel. ... Java is an object-oriented programming language developed by James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. ... Illustration of an application which may use libvorbisfile. ... Computer files can be divided into two broad categories: binary and text. ... Reverse engineering (RE) is the process of taking something (a device, an electrical component, a software program, etc. ... Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, SEHK: 4338) is an American multinational computer technology corporation that has global annual sales of over 41. ...

The aforementioned Word format is a binary format. Microsoft has stated that they will move towards an XML-based file format for their office applications: Microsoft Office Open XML. Word 2003 has an XML file format as an option using a publicly documented schema called WordprocessingML, endorsed by such institutions as the Danish Government. Computer files can be divided into two broad categories: binary and text. ... The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language for creating special-purpose markup languages, capable of describing many different kinds of data. ... It has been suggested that WordprocessingML be merged into this article or section. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Microsoft Office Open XML. (Discuss) WordprocessingML (also known as WordML and Microsoft Office Word 2003 XML Reference Schemas) is the XML schema for Microsoft Office Word 2003. ...

It is possible for a user to write a plug-in to allow Word to understand any file format. When Microsoft was not the market leader and Word Perfect was, an SDK was developed to allow advanced users to give support to other formats. This SDK is called the WinWord Converter SDK and is still available at the Microsoft web site, though is not maintained. The "professional" edition of Word 2003 includes the ability to handle non-Microsoft XML data schemas directly in Word. A Software Development Kit, or SDK for short, is typically a set of development tools that allows a software engineer to create applications for a certain software package, software framework, hardware platform, computer system, operating system or similar. ...

Like other Microsoft Office documents, Word file can be highly customised using a built-in macro language (originally WordBasic, but changed to Visual Basic for Applications as of Word 97). However, this capability can also be used to embed viruses in documents, as was demonstrated by the Melissa worm. Some anti-virus software can detect and clean common macro viruses, and firewalls may prevent worms from transmitting themselves to other systems. Microsoft Office is a suite of productivity programs created by Microsoft and developed for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh operating systems. ... // Description Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is an implementation of Microsofts Visual Basic which is built into all Microsoft Office applications (including Apple Mac OS versions), some other Microsoft applications such as Microsoft Visio - a former independent application which was acquired by Microsoft; as well as being at least... In computer security technology, a virus is a self-replicating/self-reproducing-automation program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents. ... The Melissa worm, also known as Mailissa, Simpsons, Kwyjibo, or Kwejeebo, is a computer worm that also functions as a macro virus, hence making it a multipartite virus. // History First found on March 26, 1999, Melissa shut down Internet mail systems that got clogged with infected e-mails propogating from... Anti-virus software consists of computer programs that attempt to identify, thwart and eliminate computer viruses and other malicious software (malware). ... In computing, a firewall is a piece of hardware and/or software which functions in a networked environment to prevent some communications forbidden by the security policy, analogous to the function of firewalls in building construction. ...

The first virus known to affect Microsoft Word documents was called the Concept virus, a relatively harmless virus created to demonstrate the possibility of macro virus creation.

Versions

Versions for MS-DOS include: Microsofts disk operating system, MS-DOS, was Microsofts implementation of DOS, which was the first popular operating system for the IBM PC, and until recently, was widely used on the PC compatible platform. ...

• 1983 November Word 1
• 1985 Word 2
• 1986 Word 3
• 1987 Word 4 aka Microsoft Word 4.0 for the PC
• 1989 Word 5
• 1991 Word 5.1
• 1993 Word 6.0

Versions for Apple Macintosh include: Image File history File links Microsoft_Word_10_icon. ... The first Macintosh computer, introduced in 1984, upgraded to a 512K Fat Mac. The Macintosh, or Mac, is a line of personal computers designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple Computer. ...

• 1985 January Word 1 for the Macintosh
• 1987 Word 3
• 1989 Word 4
• 1991 Word 5
• 1993 Word 6
• 1998 Word 98
• 2000 Word 2001, the last version compatible with Mac OS 9
• 2001 Word v.X, the first version for Mac OS X only
• 2004 Word 2004

Versions for Microsoft Windows include: Sherlock 2 for Mac OS 9 with the new metallic appearance Mac OS 9 was the last version of what has since become known as the classic Macintosh Operating System (Mac OS), introduced by Apple Computer on October 23, 1999. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Image File history File links Winword_2003. ... Microsoft Windows is a series of proprietary operating environments and operating systems created by Microsoft for use on personal computers and servers. ...

• 1989 November Word for Windows
• 1991 Word 2 for Windows
• 1993 Word 6 for Windows (renumbered "6" to bring Windows version numbering in line with that of DOS version, Macintosh version and also WordPerfect, the main competing word processor at the time)
• 1995 Word 95, also known as Word 7
• 1997 Word 97, also known as Word 8
• 1999 Word 2000, also known as Word 9
• 2001 Word 2002, also known as Word 10 or Word XP
• 2003 Word 2003 (officially "Microsoft Office Word 2003"), also known as Word 11
• 2007 Word 2007 (officially "Microsoft Office Word 2007"), also known as Word 12; due for release in 2007

Versions for SCO UNIX include: A screenshot of WordPerfect X3 running on Windows XP WordPerfect was also the name of a road bicycle racing team. ... Tarantella, Inc. ...

• Microsoft Word for UNIX Systems Release 5.1

Versions for OS/2 include: OS/2 is an operating system created by Microsoft and IBM and later developed by IBM exclusively. ...

• 1992 Microsoft Word for OS/2 version 1.1B

Further reading

• Tsang, Cheryl. Microsoft: First Generation. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 0-471-33206-2.
• Liebowitz, Stan J. & Margolis, Stephen E. WINNERS, LOSERS & MICROSOFT: Competition and Antitrust in High Technology Oakland: Independent Institute. ISBN 0-945999-80-1.

See also

• List of word processors
• Comparison of word processors
• Microsoft
• Microsoft Office

The following is a list of word processors. ... Word processors differ from ordinary text editors. ... Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, SEHK: 4338) is an American multinational computer technology corporation that has global annual sales of over 41. ... Microsoft Office is a suite of productivity programs created by Microsoft and developed for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh operating systems. ...

External links

• Microsoft Word home page
• MS-Word is Not a document exchange format
• No Word Attachments - the GNU project's thoughts regarding the use of Word's .DOC format to distribute text
• The Word Object Model
• MS Word Tutorial for Beginners
• Essay on Mac Word 6.0 development by Rick Schaut
• Word Refuseniks: Never Upgrade Wired article about Word 5.1 users.