Running head: OFFICE PRODUCTIVITY SUITES Holden 1
Natasia Holden
November 26, 2014
Mr Jules Ghedina
CS 285-001
Office Productivity Suites
Office productivity suites are a collection of productivity programs. There are a variety of
office productivity suites. The three that I will be focusing on are Microsoft Office, Neo Office,
and Siag Office. I found that all three of these offices have word processing and spreadsheet
applications in common. In my research I found that the most popular office productivity suite is
Microsoft Office.
The first operating environment I will be focusing on is PC/Windows. Windows is the
operating system for Microsoft. Microsoft was founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. In
1980, Bill Gates and Paul Allen hired Gates former Harvard classmate to help them run the
company. The office productivity suite that I will be associating with PC/Windows is Microsoft
Office. Microsoft office is a suite of products developed by Microsoft Corporation. It includes
Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, One Note, and Publisher.
Microsoft Word is a word processor. It is the most popular word processing program on
the planet and is available on a number of operating systems. In 1983, this program started out
as “Multi-Tool Word. “This was a basic word processor in plain text that allowed the processing
of basic text documents and for them to be saved, printed and edited in the future.”(McDonough,
2009) Microsoft recoded this software several times so that it could work on different operating
OFFICE PRODUCTIVITY SUITES Holden 2
systems such as Macintosh and DOS. They then created Word for their own operating system
and it cost $500 in stores. Microsoft began making different versions of Word for different
operating systems because having one piece of software for many operating systems became
impractical. It wasn’t until late 1996 when Word 97 was released for the PC. This was the
beginning of the Word that we all use today. Because of the Y2K scare, Microsoft stopped using
2 numbers to denote the year and started using 4 numbers so that the computer wouldn’t confuse
1900 with 2000. Microsoft word has been released in 2000, 2003, 2007, 2010, and the most
recent is MS Word 2013. In the business world, Word is used to write reports, proposals, or
anything where they need to produce words on a page.
Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application. “A spreadsheet is a large sheet of paper with
columns and rows that organizes data about transactions for a business person to examine. It
