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20th Birthday to Microsoft Word and Excel for Mac

Mr magoo   on 08 January 2004 - 23:53 · 12 comments & 1472 views

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Did you know that Microsoft are the longest standing developer group for mac products outside of apple? How ironic!

" In 1984, Microsoft's then-CEO Bill Gates was quoted as saying, "the Mac is the only microcomputer beside the IBM PC worth writing software for." At the time, Macs were still shiny and new like, well, a freshly picked apple. Holding true to his word, Gates oversaw the development of two little applications called Microsoft Word and Excel, which would eventually become household names.

Twenty years later, Microsoft continues to deliver on Gates' promise. At Macworld Conference and Expo 2004 in San Francisco this week, Microsoft announced plans to release Office 2004 for Mac and Virtual PC for Mac Version 7 in the first half of 2004. These new releases, and other products Microsoft makes for the Mac, are developed by an oasis of Mac-only developers in an otherwise Windows world at Microsoft: the Macintosh Business Unit (Mac BU). The Mac BU has made its mark in the industry, and at Microsoft, in large part by transforming four applications -- Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Entourage -- into the most popular productivity suite for the Mac platform.

Passion for the Word

Macworld magazine Editor in Chief Jason Snell, one of 7 million passionate Office for Mac customers, began using Microsoft Word 3.0 for Mac in 1987 when he wrote for his high school newspaper. Snell immediately liked the program, finding it sophisticated, yet simpler to use than competing word processing applications. Nearly two decades have passed, and Snell is still using Word, specifically Word X, and considers it the standard word processing application for the Mac platform.

"Word is a fantastic program," says Snell. "My Mac wouldn't be as impressive without it. The features introduced in Word over the years have absolutely changed the way I work. For example, I used to highlight the changes I made to a document in different colors when editing. When Microsoft introduced Track Changes in Word 98, it changed the way I worked, ultimately helping me work more efficiently."

View: Article : 20 years of Word + Excel for Mac


Features:

- fast video decompression using optimized MMX, SSE and 3DNow! code
- support for different codecs: XviD, all DivX versions, MS WMV, MPEG-1 and - MPEG-2
- image postprocessing for higher playback quality
- automatic quality control: automatically reduces postprocessing level when CPU load is high
- hue, saturation and luminance correction
- experimental sharpening filter
- noising (of course if you want it)
- presets
- completely free software: ffdshow is distributed under GPL
- support for various subtitle formats

Post a comment · Send to friend Comments · There are 12 additional comments
#1 Mav Phoenix on 09 Jan 2004 - 00:49
Indeed ironic...
#2 burning_jonny on 09 Jan 2004 - 01:22
Nuts, and I just got VPC 6.1...

As long as they add import PST functionality into Entourage with lame workarounds.
(7 replies) #3 iczman on 09 Jan 2004 - 02:43
how come mac version of office always have better icons then the window version?
#3.1 Hidr0 on 09 Jan 2004 - 03:17
I have been pondering th same question...
#3.2 Rudy on 09 Jan 2004 - 03:45
i actually think the Office 2003 are the best but before it was true
#3.3 Mav Phoenix on 09 Jan 2004 - 04:40
QUOTE (#3.2)
i actually think the Office 2003 are the best but before it was true

That didn't make any sense.
#3.4 warwagon on 09 Jan 2004 - 05:30
he ment before office 2003 came along we had crappy icons.... but with the release of office 2003 our icons got better looking
#3.5 Rudy on 09 Jan 2004 - 06:11
thats what i meant, i was writing this in a hurry
#3.6 xRKx on 09 Jan 2004 - 14:53
QUOTE
how come mac version of office always have better icons then the window version?


The Mac version of Word (at least,) is always better than the PC version, all in all, I've always thought. I kept using Word.. 3 or 4 for Mac, on my old Powerbook 145 (read: Black and white Powerbook.) because it was simply that much nicer an experience.
#3.7 XP_2003 on 09 Jan 2004 - 19:13
It has to run on Windows 98/2000 boxes too, as they don't support 32 bit icons with alpha blending we'll get more crappy icons. Office for Mac is made only for OS X. That's why I think.
#4 Liquid on 09 Jan 2004 - 06:07
The mac team spends more time on the eye candy for the mac products because that basically wut OSX is. Well its alot more than that but yah
#5 mipra on 16 Jan 2004 - 02:53
man...I really cannot realize that it has been 20 years...

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