MS Word

Microsoft Word or MS-WORD (often called Word) is a graphical word processing program that users can type with. It is made by the computercompany Microsoft. Its purpose is to allow users to type and save documents.

Similar to other word processors, it has helpful tools to make documents.

§  Spelling & grammar checker, word count (this also counts letters and lines)

§  Speech recognition

§  Inserts pictures in documents

§  Web pages, graphs, etc.

§  Tables

§  Displays synonyms of words and can read out the text

§  Prints in different ways

MS Word is part of Microsoft Office, but can also be bought separately.

History

The program was first released in 1981. Many of the ideas and features in Microsoft Word came from Bravo, the first graphical writing program. Microsoft bought the Bravo program, and changed its name to Microsoft Word. When it first came out, it was not very popular, and did not sell as well as other writing programs like WordPerfect. Although it was not very popular when it came out, it had a feature called WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), which meant that people can change the visual style of writing (e.g. bold, italics), by clicking on buttons, when in other programs like WordPerfect, people had to add special 'codes' to change the style of writing. WYSIWYG is now a common feature of all computer writing programs.

There are versions for Microsoft Word for other operating systems as well as Microsoft Windows. New versions support fewer operating systems, although they always support Windows.