Microsoft Office 2007

Microsoft Office 2007 (codenamed Office 12) is a version of Microsoft Office, a family of office suites and productivity software for Windows, developed and published by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on November 3, 2006; it was subsequently made available to volume license customers on November 30, 2006, and later to retail on January 30, 2007, the same respective release dates of Windows Vista. It was preceded by Office 2003 and succeeded by Office 2010.

Office 2007 introduced a new graphical user interface called the Fluent User Interface, which uses ribbons and an Office menu instead of menu bars and toolbars. Office 2007 also introduced Office Open XML file formats as the default file formats in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. The new formats are intended to facilitate the sharing of information between programs, improve security, reduce the size of documents, and enable new recovery scenarios.

Office 2007 requires Windows XP with Service Pack 2, Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1, or a later version of Windows; it is the last version of Microsoft Office to run on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

Office 2007 includes new applications and server-side tools, including Microsoft Office Groove, a collaboration and communication suite for smaller businesses, which was originally developed by Groove Networks before being acquired by Microsoft in 2005. Also included is Office SharePoint Server 2007, a major revision to the server platform for Office applications, which supports Excel Services, a client-server architecture for supporting Excel workbooks that are shared in real time between multiple machines, and are also viewable and editable through a web page.

With Microsoft FrontPage discontinued, Microsoft SharePoint Designer, which is aimed towards development of SharePoint portals, becomes part of the Office 2007 family. Its designer-oriented counterpart, Microsoft Expression Web, is targeted for general web development. However, neither application has been included in Office 2007 software suites.

Speech recognition functionality has been removed from the individual programs in the Office 2007 suite, as Windows Speech Recognition was integrated into Windows Vista. Windows XP users must install a previous version of Office to use speech recognition features.

According to Forrester Research, as of May 2010, Microsoft Office 2007 is used in 81% of enterprises it surveyed (its sample comprising 115 North American and European enterprise and SMB decision makers).

Mainstream support for Office 2007 ended on October 9, 2012, and extended support ended on October 10, 2017.

Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology company with headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers. In 2016, it was the world’s largest software maker by revenue (currently Alphabet/Google has more revenue). The word “Microsoft” is a portmanteau of “microcomputer” and “software”. Microsoft is ranked No. 30 in the 2018 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.

Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. The company’s 1986 initial public offering (IPO), and subsequent rise in its share price, created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires among Microsoft employees. Since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions, their largest being the acquisition of LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in December 2016, followed by their acquisition of Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion in May 2011.

As of 2015, Microsoft is market-dominant in the IBM PC compatible operating system market and the office software suite market, although it has lost the majority of the overall operating system market to Android. The company also produces a wide range of other consumer and enterprise software for desktops, laptops, tabs, gadgets, and servers, including Internet search (with Bing), the digital services market (through MSN), mixed reality (HoloLens), cloud computing (Azure), and software development (Visual Studio).

Steve Ballmer replaced Gates as CEO in 2000, and later envisioned a “devices and services” strategy. This unfolded with Microsoft acquiring Danger Inc. in 2008, entering the personal computer production market for the first time in June 2012 with the launch of the Microsoft Surface line of tablet computers, and later forming Microsoft Mobile through the acquisition of Nokia’s devices and services division. Since Satya Nadella took over as CEO in 2014, the company has scaled back on hardware and has instead focused on cloud computing, a move that helped the company’s shares reach its highest value since December 1999.

Earlier dethroned by Apple in 2010, in 2018 Microsoft reclaimed its position as the most valuable publicly traded company in the world. In April 2019, Microsoft reached the trillion-dollar market cap, becoming the third U.S. public company to be valued at over $1 trillion after Apple and Amazon respectively.