Microsoft Office in the context of Microsoft Word

The Rich Text Format (often abbreviated RTF) is a proprietary document file format with published specification developed by Microsoft Corporation from 1987 until 2008 for cross-platform document interchange with Microsoft products. Prior to 2008, Microsoft published updated specifications for RTF with major revisions of Microsoft Word and Office versions.

Most word processors are able to read and write some versions of RTF. There are several different revisions of RTF specification; portability of files will depend on what version of RTF is being used.

Microsoft is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions. Established on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, Microsoft rose to dominate the home computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems. Microsoft would also come to dominate the office suite market with Microsoft Office. The company has diversified in recent years into the video game industry with the Xbox, the Xbox 360, the Xbox One, and the Xbox Series X/S as well as into the consumer electronics and digital services market with Zune, MSN and the Windows Phone OS.

The company's initial public offering was held on March 14, 1986. The stock, which eventually closed at $27.75 a share, peaked at $29.25 a share shortly after the market opened for trading. After the offering, Microsoft had a market capitalization of $519.777 million. Microsoft has subsequently acquired over 225 companies, purchased stakes in 64 companies, and made 25 divestments. Of the companies that Microsoft has acquired, 107 were based in the United States. Microsoft has not released financial details for most of these mergers and acquisitions.

Liberation is the collective name of four TrueType font families: Liberation Sans, Liberation Sans Narrow, Liberation Serif, and Liberation Mono. These fonts are metrically compatible with the most popular fonts on the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office software package (Monotype Corporation's Arial, Arial Narrow, Times New Roman and Courier New, respectively), for which Liberation is intended as a free substitute. The fonts are default in LibreOffice.

Pocket PC 2000 (marketed as Pocket PC) was the first member of the Windows Mobile family of mobile operating systems that was released on April 19, 2000, and was based on Windows CE 3.0. It is the successor to the operating system aboard Palm-size PCs; backwards compatibility was retained with such Palm-size PC applications. It was mainly intended for Pocket PC devices, however several Palm-size PC devices had the ability to be updated also. Furthermore, several Pocket PC 2000 phones were released (under the name Handheld PC 2000), although Microsoft's "Smartphone" hardware platform had not yet been established at that time.

Aesthetically, Pocket PC 2000 was meant to be similar in design to the then-current Windows 98 and Windows 2000 desktop operating systems, as well as the yet-to-be-released Windows Me (which was still in development at the time of Pocket PC 2000's release). It had multiple built-in applications, many of them similarly branded to match their desktop counterparts, such as Microsoft Reader, Microsoft Money, Pocket Internet Explorer, and Windows Media Player. A version of Microsoft Office called Pocket Office was also bundled and included Pocket Word, Pocket Excel and Pocket Outlook. Notes, a note-taking app saw its first release and would be supported by most later versions of Windows Mobile.

Microsoft Store was a chain of retail stores and is an online shopping site, owned and operated by Microsoft and dealing in computers, computer software, and consumer electronics.

The Microsoft Store offered Signature PCs and tablets like the Microsoft Surface, and offerings from third parties such as Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and VAIO without demos nor trialware (pre-installed free trials of certain third-party software that expire after a limited time). It also offered Windows (most retail versions), Microsoft Office, and Xbox One game consoles, games, and services including on-site Xbox diagnostics. The Answers Desk helped to answer questions related to Office, Windows, and other Microsoft products; the stores also offered class sessions as well as individual appointments.

OpenOffice.org is an open-source office productivity software suite. It originated from the proprietary StarOffice, developed by Star Division, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999. Sun open-sourced the software in July 2000 as a free alternative to Microsoft Office, and released OpenOffice.org version 1.0 on 1 May 2002. Latest version 4.1.16 in November 2025 is a security update.

Following Sun's acquisition by Oracle Corporation, development of OpenOffice.org slowed and eventually ended. In 2011, Oracle donated the project to the Apache Software Foundation, which continues it as Apache OpenOffice,, with the most-recent version being 4.1.16, released on November 10, 2025. A fork of OpenOffice, LibreOffice, was created in 2010 by members of the OpenOffice.org community.