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Since the Microsoft Office suite is inherently tied to the Microsoft operating system, its use featured in user frustrations around end-of-life for Microsoft XP and the successive Vista and Windows 7, 8 and 10 additions.Īt the same time, Microsoft was getting on the cloud bandwagon. docx became the default file format, replacing the “.doc” extension.Īs Microsoft Word modernized over time, so did Microsoft operating systems. Word is compatible with many other programs, the most common being the other members of the Office suite. MS Word offers text-level features such as bold, underline, italic and strike-through, and page-level features such as indentation, paragraphing and justification. In addition, MS Word has a built-in dictionary for spell checking misspelled words are marked with a red squiggly underline. The ability of users to copy and paste MS Word content into many other platforms without significant formatting loss is one reason the software has stayed so popular in the last two decades. Some features that have made MS Word useful include a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) display: this design ensures that everything displayed on screen appears the same way when printed or moved to another format or program.
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In 1995, Microsoft increased its market share in the word processor business with the release of Windows 95 and Office 95, which offered a bundled set of office productivity software.
What is microsoft word online upgrade#
The second major release of Word, in 1987, included an upgrade of major features, in addition to new functionalities such as support for rich text format (RTF). However, Microsoft improved Word continually over the years, including a 1985 version that could run on a Mac. Initially, MS Word was not very popular, owing to its radically different look compared to WordPerfect, the leading word processor at that time. In 1981, Microsoft hired Charles Simonyi to develop a word-processing application.
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