Productivity software

Productivity software (sometimes called personal productivity software or office productivity software) is application software dedicated to producing information, such as documents, presentations, worksheets, databases, charts, graphs, digital paintings, electronic music and digital video. Its names arose from the fact that it increases productivity, especially of individual office workers, from typists to knowledge workers, although its scope is now wider than that. Office suites, which brought word processing, spreadsheet, and relational database programs to the desktop in the 1980s, are the core example of productivity software. They revolutionized the office with the magnitude of the productivity increase they brought as compared with the pre-1980s office environments of typewriters, paper filing, and handwritten lists and ledgers. In the 2010s, productivity software has become even more consumerized than it already was, as computing becomes ever more integrated into daily personal life.

Microsoft Office 2016

Microsoft Office 2016 (codenamed Office 16) is a version of the Microsoft Office productivity suite, succeeding both Office 2013 and Office for Mac 2011. It was released on OS X on 9 July 2015 for Office 365 subscribers. Mainstream support ends on October 13, 2020, and extended support ends on October 14, 2025, the same times as Windows 10. The perpetually licensed version on OS X and Windows was released on 22 September 2015.

New features

Windows

New features in the Windows release include the ability to create, open, edit, and save files in the cloud straight from the desktop, a new search tool for commands available in Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook named "Tell Me", more "Send As" options in Word and PowerPoint, and co-authoring in real time with users connected to Office Online. Other smaller features include Insights, a feature powered by Bing to provide contextual information from the web, a Designer sidebar in PowerPoint to optimize the layout of slides, new chart types and templates in Excel (such as treemap, sunburst chart (also known as a ring chart), waterfall chart, box plot and histogram, and financial and calendar templates), new animations in PowerPoint (such as the Morph transition), the ability to insert online video in OneNote, and a data loss prevention feature in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office is an office suite of applications, servers, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of Office contained Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Over the years, Office applications have grown substantially closer with shared features such as a common spell checker, OLE data integration and Visual Basic for Applications scripting language. Microsoft also positions Office as a development platform for line-of-business software under the Office Business Applications brand.

On 10 July 2012, Softpedia reported that Office is used by over a billion people worldwide.

The desktop version of Office is available for Windows and OS X. A touch-optimised version of Microsoft Office is available pre-installed on Windows RT tablets. A mobile version of Office, Office Mobile, is available for free on Windows Phone, iOS and Android. A web-based version of Office, Office Online, is also available. Microsoft has stated that it plans to create a version of Office for "other popular platforms" as well.