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Microsoft Word is a word processor program from
Microsoft. It was originally written by Richard Brodie
for IBM PC computers running DOS in 1983.
Later versions were created for the Apple Macintosh (1984),
SCO UNIX, and Microsoft Windows (1989). It
became part of the Microsoft Office suite.
Microsoft Word owes a lot to Bravo, the original
GUI word processor developed at Xerox PARC. Bravo's
creator Charles Simonyi left PARC to work for Microsoft
in 1981.
Word's first general release was for MS-DOS computers
in late 1983. It was not well received, and sales lagged
behind those of rival products such as WordPerfect.
On the Macintosh, however, Word gained wide acceptance
after it was released in 1985, and especially with the
second major release, Word 3.01 for Macintosh, two
years later (Word 3.00 was plagued with bugs and quickly
superseded). Like other Mac software, Word for Mac
was a true what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG)
editor.
Although MS-DOS was a character-based system, Word
for DOS was the first word processor for the IBM
PC that showed typeface markups such as bold and italics directly
on the screen while editing, although this was not a true WYSIWYG
system. Other DOS word processors, such as WordStar
and WordPerfect, used simple text-only display with markup
codes on the screen or sometimes, at the most, alternative colors.
However, as with most DOS software, each program had its
own, often complicated, set of commands for performing functions
that had to be learned (for example, in Word for DOS, a
file would be saved with the sequence Escape-T-S), and as most
secretaries had learned how to use WordPerfect, companies
were reluctant to switch to a rival product that offered few advantages.
The first version of Word for Windows, released in 1989
at a price of 500 US dollars, showed the direction Microsoft
was planning to take Word; like Windows itself,
it had learned much from the Macintosh, and used standard
commands (such as control-S to save a file). With the release
of Windows 3.0 the following year, sales began to pick
up (Word 1.0 worked much better with Windows 3.0
than with the previous Windows/386 and Windows/286
versions), and rival WordPerfect's failure to create a
workable Windows version proved a fatal mistake. It was
version 2.0 of WinWord, however, that firmly established
Microsoft Word as the market leader.
Word on the Macintosh never had any serious rivals,
despite programs such as Nisus that provided features such
as non-contiguous selection that was not added to Word
until Word2002 in Office XP, and despite some users'
belief that the program had not had a major overhaul between versions
3.01 in 1987 and version 5.0 in 1991.
But many computer users believe that Word 5.1 for the Macintosh
is still the best word processor ever made, thanks to its
elegance, relative ease of use, and feature set. However, version
6.0 for the Macintosh, released 1994, was widely derided. It was
the first Word version in which the core code was the same
between the Windows and Mac versions; many accused
it of being slow, clumsy bloatware. The Windows version,
although it followed version 2.0, was also numbered
6.0 to coordinate product naming.
Later versions of Word have more capabilities than just
word processing. The Drawing tool allows simple desktop publishing
operations such as adding graphics to documents, although a proper
desktop publishing program is obviously better at these tasks.
Collaboration, document comparison, multilingual support and many
other capabilities have been added over the years.
Microsoft Word is the dominant word processor in
current use, making Word's proprietary document file format
(DOC) the de facto standard which competing products must
support to interoperate in an office environment. File import
and export filters exist for many word processors such
as AbiWord or OpenOffice. Most of this interoperability
is achieved through reverse engineering since documentation of
the file format, while available to partners, is not openly available.
The document formats of the various versions of Word change in
subtle and not so subtle ways; formatting created in newer versions
does not always survive when viewed in older versions of the program,
nearly always because that capability does not exist in the provious
version. The DOC format of Word 97 was publicly
documented by Microsoft, but later versions have been kept
private, available only to partners, governments and institutions.
Industry rumors claim some aspects of the Word file format
are at present not fully understood even by Microsoft themselves.
Lately Microsoft has stated that they will move towards
an XML-based file format for their office applications.
Word 2003 has an XML file format as an option using
a publicly documented schema called WordprocessingML available
in all editions of Word2003, and endorsed by such institutions
as the Danish Government. The "professional" edition
includes the ability to handle non-Microsoft schemas directly
in Word. Apache Jakarta POI is an open-source Java library
that aims to read and write Word's binary file format.
Like other Microsoft Office applications, Word
can be highly customised using a built-in macro language (originally
WordBasic, but changed to Visual Basic for Applications
as of Word 97). However, this capability can also be used
to embed viruses in documents, as was demonstrated by the Melissa
worm. Because of this, users having Microsoft Word installed should
make sure their security settings are set to High (Tools/Macro>Security).
In this case also, a minimum precaution is to have anti-virus
software installed in order to avoid being infected by such a
virus or acting as a source of infection. The first virus known
to affect Microsoft Word documents was called the Concept
virus, a relatively harmless virus created to demonstrate the
possibility of macro virus creation.
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