Microsoft Word 2

Microsoft Word for Mac since 1995

In 1997, Microsoft formed the Macintosh Business Unit as an independent group within Microsoft focused on writing software for the Mac. Its first version of Word, Word 98, was released with Office 98 Macintosh Edition. Document compatibility reached parity with Word 97,^[18] and it included features from Word 97 for Windows, including spell and grammar checking with squiggles.^[25] Users could choose the menus and keyboard shortcuts to be similar to either Word 97 for Windows or Word 5 for Mac.

Word 2001, released in 2000, added a few new features, including the Office Clipboard, which allowed users to copy and paste multiple items.^[26] It was the last version to run on classic Mac OS and, on Mac OS X, it could only run within the Classic Environment. Word X, released in 2001, was the first version to run natively on, and required, Mac OS X,^[25] and introduced non-contiguous text selection.^[27]

Word 2004 was released in May 2004. It included a new Notebook Layout view for taking notes either by typing or by voice.^[28] Other features, such as tracking changes, were made more similar with Office for Windows.^[29]

Word 2008, released on January 15, 2008, included a Ribbon-like feature, called the Elements Gallery, that can be used to select page layouts and insert custom diagrams and images. It also included a new view focused on publishing layout, integrated bibliography management,^[30] and native support for the new Office Open XML format. It was the first version to run natively on Intel-based Macs.^[31] Word 2011, released in October 2010, replaced the Elements Gallery in favor of a Ribbon user interface that is much more similar to Office for Windows,^[32] and includes a full-screen mode that allows users to focus on reading and writing documents, and support for Office Web Apps.^[33]

[edit]File formats

[edit]File extension

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:

1. Word for DOS
2. Word for Windows 1 and 2; Word 4 and 5 for Mac
3. Word 6 and Word 95 for Windows; Word 6 for Mac
4. Word 97, 2000, 2002 and 2003 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, includingOpenOffice.org Writer, an open source word processing program.^[34]

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.^[35] This means it is possible the document the recipient sees might not be exactly the same as the document the sender sees.

[edit]Binary formats (Word 97–2003)

This section includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (February 2011)

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the default Word document format (.DOC) became a de facto standard of document file formats for Microsoft Office users. Though usually just referred to as "Word Document Format", this term refers primarily to the range of formats used by default in Word version 97-2003.

Word document files by using the Word 97-2003 Binary File Format implement OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) structured storage to manage the structure of their file format. OLE behaves rather like a conventional hard drive file system and is made up of several key components. Each Word document is composed of so-called "big blocks" which are almost always (but do not have to be) 512-byte chunks; hence a Word document's file size will in most cases be a multiple of 512.

"Storages" are analogues of the directory on a disk drive, and point to other storages or "streams" which are similar to files on a disk. The text in a Word document is always contained in the "WordDocument" stream. The first big block in a Word document, known as the "header" block, provides important information as to the location of the major data structures in the document. "Property storages" provide metadata about the storages and streams in a doc file, such as where it begins and its name and so forth. The "File information block" contains information about where the text in a Word document starts, ends, what version of Word created the document and other attributes.

Microsoft has published specifications for the Word 97-2003 Binary File Format.^[36] However, these specifications were criticised for not documenting all of the features used by Word binary file format.^[37]

Word 2007 and 2010 continue to support the DOC file format, although it is no longer the default.

[edit]XML Document (Word 2003)

Main article: Microsoft Office XML formats

The XML format introduced in Word 2003^[38] was a simple, XML-based format called WordprocessingML.

[edit]Microsoft Office Open XML (Word 2007 and above)

Word 2007 introduced a new XML-based file format called Office Open XML (OOXML). The version of OOXML that Word 2007 supports is the ECMA-376 standard, published by Ecma International.^[39] After the release of Office 2007, OOXML underwent another round of standardization under the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The standard, ISO/IEC 29500:2008, has two variants. ATransitional variant is intended for legacy compatibility and is not supposed to be used to produce new documents. A Strict variant is based on ISO's revisions and improvements to the ECMA standard.

Word 2010 supports reading and writing Transitional documents but only reading Strict documents. This caused consternation among members of the ISO Office Open XML subcommittee, who claimed that Microsoft was only paying lip service to the standards process.^[40] In response, Microsoft said that the Strict schema will be fully supported no later than Office 15, the next major version after Office 2010.^[41]

In August 2009, Canadian firm i4i sued Microsoft before the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas for infringing on asoftware patent involving custom XML in a document.^[42] In December 2009, the judgment of the district court was affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.^[43] An injunction was issued that banned Microsoft from selling copies of Word with the code that infringes on the patent after January 11, 2010.^[44] Several days after the court ruling, Microsoft released a "mandatory patch" that brings the software into compliance with the court's decision.^[45][46]

In November 2010, the US supreme court agreed to hear an appeal by Microsoft.^[47] The case was scheduled to be heard in court on April 18, 2011.^[48] On June 9, 2011 the United States Supreme Court ruled against Microsoft Corp. and in favour of Toronto’s i4i Inc.^[49]

[edit]Attempts at cross-version compatibility

Opening a Word Document file in a version of Word other than the one with which it was created can cause incorrect display of the document. The document formats of the various versions change in subtle and not so subtle ways (such as changing the font, or the handling of more complex tasks like footnotes), creating a "lock in" phenomenon to the base (proprietary) standard.^[50] Formatting created in newer versions does not always survive when viewed in older versions of the program, nearly always because that capability does not exist in the previous version.^[50] Rich Text Format (RTF), an early effort to create a format for interchanging formatted text between applications, is an optional format for Word that retains most formatting and all content of the original document.

Later, after HTML appeared, Word supported an HTML derivative as an additional full-fidelity roundtrip format similar to RTF, with the additional capability that the file could be viewed in a web browser. Though an .html extension is applied to the file produced, that file will fail the W3C Validator spectacularly. If the file is intended to be uploaded as a Web page, use of a tool such as HTML Tidy is a necessary step so that visitors' downloads aren't bloated with the unnecessary Microsoft-specific markup.