Where’s my Office?

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I’d like to spend today’s blog clarifying the association between Microsoft’s Office suite and the operating systems that are running a computer.

Well… it happened again.  A client’s computer died (hard drive crashed) and they wanted me to reinstall Windows XP.  Upon completion the user was curious as to where her Excel program was.

Microsoft’s Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, etc is part of Microsoft’s Office suite.  In fact there are several flavors of the Office suite.  You have the varying versions (Office 2000, Office 2003, Office XP, Office 2007 and now the emerging Office 2010) that each contain the various programs (Word, Excel, etc) as well as the different versions of these versions…

Office Home and Student, for example, contains Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.  Office Professional has Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher and Outlook with a contact manager.  Office Small Business is Office Professional without Access.   You also have Office Standard and Ultimate.  The link that shows these differences is here (for now).

For the sake of this blog, Microsoft Office can be compared to any other program that you install after you purchase a computer… a game program for example.  If you likened the operating system (Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista or Windows 7) to an automobile you could say that Microsoft Office is a GPS device.  You can buy the car and then run up to the store and buy a GPS system.  Some manufacturers’, like Dell, will let you optionally purchase Office with your computer but this is simply to save you the leg work of obtaining the Office program yourself.

Often times the computer comes with an operating system restore CD… these CD’s do not contain the Office program… they contain the operating system (XP, Vista, etc) only.

I hope this helps to clarify any misunderstandings.

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