Microsoft Office, MS Office, or simply Office, is an office suite and (formerly) a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. The first version of the Office suite, announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX, contained Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint, all three of which remain core products in Office. Over time, the Office suite has grown substantially, adding programs such as OneNote and Outlook; the suite has also been made highly extensible with the use of the VBA scripting language.
Since Office 2013, Microsoft has promoted Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) as the primary means of obtaining Microsoft Office: it allows the use of the software and other services on a subscription business model, and users receive feature updates to the software for the lifetime of the subscription, including new features and cloud computing integration that are not necessarily included in the "on-premises" releases of Office sold under conventional license terms.
The suite currently includes a word processor (Word), a spreadsheet program (Excel), a presentation program (PowerPoint), a note-taking program (OneNote), and an email client (Outlook); the Windows version also includes a database management system (Access). Microsoft Office previously offered desktop, mobile, and web applications.
