History of Microsoft Office

This is a history of the various versions of Microsoft Office, consisting of a bundle of several different applications which changed over time. This table only includes final releases and not pre-release or beta software. It also does not list the history of the constituent standalone applications which were released much earlier starting with Word in 1983, Excel in 1985, and PowerPoint in 1987.

Office versions

Summary

Microsoft Office 95

Microsoft Office 97

Microsoft Office 2000

Microsoft Office 2000 Personal was an additional SKU, solely designed for the Japanese market, that included Word 2000, Excel 2000 and Outlook 2000. This compilation would later become widespread as Microsoft Office 2003 Basic.

Microsoft Office XP

Microsoft Office 2003

Microsoft Office 2007

¹ Office Customization Tool is used to customize the installation of Office 2007 by creating a Windows Installer patch file (.MSP) and replacing the Custom Installation Wizard and Custom Deployment Wizard included in earlier versions of the Office Resource Kit that created a Windows Installer Transform (.MST).

Microsoft Office 2010

Microsoft Office 2013

Remarks

Microsoft Office 2016

As with previous versions, Office 2016 is made available in several distinct editions aimed towards different markets. All traditional editions of Microsoft Office 2016 contain Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote and are licensed for use on one computer. The installation of retail channels of Office 2016 is Click-To-Run (C2R), however volume licensing channels Office 2016 are using traditional Microsoft Installer (MSI).

Five traditional editions of Office 2016 were released for Windows:

• Home & Student: This retail suite includes the core applications only.
• Home & Business: This retail suite includes the core applications and Outlook.
• Standard: This suite, only available through volume licensing channels, includes the core applications, as well as Outlook and Publisher.
• Professional: This retail suite includes the core applications, as well as Outlook, Publisher and Access.
• Professional Plus: This suite available through MSDN retail channels and volume licensing channels, includes the core applications, as well as Outlook, Publisher, Access and Skype for Business. The deployment of this edition has C2R for MSDN retail channels and MSI for volume licensing channels.

For a comparison chart for the new version of Office, Microsoft 365, click here.

Three traditional editions of Office 2016 were released for Mac:

• Home & Student: This retail suite includes the core applications only.
• Home & Business: This retail suite includes the core applications and Outlook.
• Standard: This suite, only available through volume licensing channels, includes the core applications and Outlook.

Mac versions

Office 98

Notes

References