The Office Suite

The Office desktop productivity software in combination with Windows is still responsible for a major portion of Microsoft’s revenues and profits, but because Office can be acquired preinstalled on some new computers, in retail stores, through special offers targeting students and small businesses, and to large organizations through volume license agreements, the particular set of Office applications that an organization purchases can differ significantly.

For the Office 2010 release, six products make up the core of Office and are typically available in most Office packages: Access (database), Excel (spreadsheet), OneNote (note taking), Outlook (e-mail client), PowerPoint (presentations), and Word (text documents). These products are considered core because they have typically been included in the versions of Office that most organizations license.

Most organizations also use two additional Office-branded applications: Project (project management) and Visio (business graphics), but because these two products are not included in any Office suites they are typically deployed only to a subset of users.