Microsoft Office

I4i has won the support of the U.S. government as its patent infringement case against Microsoft winds it way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The case stems from a lawsuit filed by I4i in 2007 in which it claimed that Microsoft had violated one of I4i's patents by including a custom XML feature in Microsoft Word. Though Microsoft lost on both the initial verdict and the appeal, the software giant filed another appeal last year, this time with the Supreme Court, which agreed last November to hear the case.

I4i, a small Canadian company, has received strong … Read more

The cloud is coming to Microsoft Office--and it's powered by Google.

Google's latest effort to lure business customers away from Microsoft Office to Google Apps comes in the form of a plug-in for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The plug-in (pictured below) essentially syncs Office files with an online counterpart that lives in Google Docs, which allows users to always see the most recent version of a file, whether they're viewing it in a browser, in an Office app or even on a mobile device.

That means no more emailing a Word document between multiple people, only to … Read more

A Microsoft job posting has provided clues into Microsoft's strategy to make its Office Web applications more friendly to touch-screen devices.

A listing that went up over the weekend for a software development engineer touts some of the successes of Microsoft's Outlook Web App (OWA), saying it has "made a huge difference in the daily lives of millions of users all over the world" but that the company is looking for someone to take OWA to "the next level" with a "next generation" client. That client would be for both the desktop … Read more

Microsoft says that by next month, users worldwide will be able to get their hands on the free, online version of its Office suite.

In a post on the Office Blog earlier this week, the company said that it had expanded Office Web Apps availability in 150 new countries including Mexico, India, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, and that by next month it will hit "all remaining markets in Central and South America."

The free service, which contains Web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, was launched by Microsoft in June of last year. Microsoft says that 30 … Read more

Microsoft today announced that its chemistry add-in for Word is now freely available for download and tweaking by the open-source community.

The tool, which was released in beta form in March of last year and has since been downloaded 250,000 times, lets users create and modify chemical information inside of Word 2007 and 2010. This includes chemical formulas, labels, and 2D structures that can more easily be worked on than with Word's standard formatting tools.

Also known as Chem4Word, the add-in was developed through a partnership between Microsoft Research and three professors at the University of Cambridge. As … Read more

A Microsoft press event held last week in Redmond under the name "The Future of Productivity Council" wasn't about introducing new and exciting products. But the day-long event Friday did give us a closer look at how Microsoft develops productivity software and also allowed us to hear from several Microsoft executives about what they are trying to accomplish in the productivity sphere.

The first half of the day we watched presentations by various team leaders at Microsoft discussing how productivity products are made and about our slow evolution towards cloud computing.

Gary Heil, the founder of the … Read more

Microsoft might not be selling Office in the Mac App Store now, but that doesn't mean it never will.

"It's something we are looking at," Microsoft's Amanda Lefebvre told All Things Digital's Mobilized blog in an interview yesterday. "It's something we haven't ruled out. We just have to see how that relates to our business."

The Mac App Store, which launched earlier this month, could provide Microsoft with another viable outlet to profit on its productivity suite on the Mac. However, there would be consequences to such an action.

For … Read more

Microsoft today has added a free, 30-day trial version of its Office for Mac software to coincide with this year's Macworld Expo, taking place later this week in San Francisco.

Since the release of Office for Mac 2011 in October of last year, the only way to give the product a spin was to visit a retailer with a copy installed, or to purchase it. Now users can download the 600MB trial from Microsoft's Office site, which contains full versions of all its applications. When the trial expires, users can then upgrade to either the Home and Student, … Read more

In an important step towards making its note-taking and notebook-authoring service available in more places, Microsoft today has released a pocket-sized version of its OneNote application for Apple's iOS.

The software lets users make things like bulleted lists and checklists, as well as grab and insert photos from the user's photo library or the camera app. All these things can be combined into one note with a slightly modified version of the iOS keyboard that adds feature shortcuts just above the keys.

OneNote Mobile for iOS shares a similar feature set to its cousin on Windows Phone 7, … Read more