Microsoft Word

Microsoft Office Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS (1983), the Apple Macintosh (1984), the AT&T Unix PC (1985), Atari ST (1986), SCO UNIX, OS/2, and Microsoft Windows (1989). It is a component of the Microsoft Office software system; it is also sold as a standalone product and included in Microsoft Works Suite. The current versions are Microsoft Office Word 2010 for Windows and Microsoft Office Word 2011 for Mac.


Microsoft Word's native file formats are denoted either by a .doc or .docx file extension.
Although the ".doc" extension has been used in many different versions of Word, it actually encompasses four distinct file formats:
Word for DOS
Word for Windows 1 and 2; Word 4 and 5 for Mac
Word 6 and Word 95 for Windows; Word 6 for Mac
Word 97, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2007 and 2010 for Windows; Word 98, 2001, X, and 2004 for Mac
The newer ".docx" extension signifies the Office Open XML international standard for Office documents and is used by Word 2007 and 2010 for Windows, Word 2008 and 2011 for the Macintosh, as well as by a growing number of applications from other vendors, including OpenOffice.org Writer, an open source word processing program.

Microsoft does not guarantee the correct display of the document on different workstations, even if the two workstations use the same version of Microsoft Word, primarily due to page layout depending on the current printer. This means it is possible the document the recipient sees might not be exactly the same as the document the sender sees.