Microsoft Office

SAN FRANCISCO--Microsoft is tired of seeing Salesforce.com get all the headlines by dishing out a combination of pithy quotes and branded chocolates to the technology press.

Although Redmond has no plans to one-up Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff in the candy distribution business, it is starting to speak out more strongly.

"I think Marc and Salesforce have done a good job of getting out there and telling their vision, their story," Corporate Vice President Michael Park told CNET in an interview this week. "I think we have an opportunity to do better."

Of course, Salesforce.… Read more

Although officially only two months old, Microsoft's Office Web Apps is already growing up a bit.

To satisfy just some of the many user requests for new features, Microsoft this week updated its online version of Office with enhancements to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

One of the most requested features, according to a company blog post, was the ability to print from the Word editor. Previously, you could only print from the Word viewer. Clicking on the File menu in the Word Web App editor now displays a Print command that lets you send a document to your local … Read more

Microsoft said Wednesday the next version of Office for Mac will get two key features that were part of the latest Windows version: photo editing and mini charts in Excel, known as Sparklines.

In a video posted on its Office for Mac Web site, the company showed how the two features will work. Sparklines are tiny charts that fit in a single cell and allow one to see the trend in individual data points.

As for the photo editing, Microsoft said Office for Mac will allow such things as color correction or background removal from within the new versions of … Read more

Adrian Mercado credits Mr. Gates at Microsoft with turning around his life.

No, it's not Bill Gates--although Microsoft Office did play a starring role in Mercado's transformation from wayward youth to motivated future worker. Rather, it is Kevin Gates--a dreadlocked, African American Microsoft employee, who Mercado said really inspired him.

Mercado, 17, was one of more than 50 teenagers and young adults who competed this week in a global competition to determine the world's most proficient users of Excel and Word.

More than 115,000 people--mostly students--entered the Worldwide Competition on Microsoft Office, with the best of … Read more

Microsoft will issue 14 security bulletins on Tuesday to plug 34 holes, including eight that are critical, in Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, SQL and Silverlight, the company said on Thursday.

"This will be the most bulletins we have ever released in a month; we have released 13 bulletins on a couple of occasions," Angela Gunn, security response communications manager at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. "However, in total CVE [common vulnerabilities and exposures] count, this release ties with June 2010, so there's no new record there."

Affected software includes: Windows 7; Windows XP; Vista; … Read more

Microsoft on Monday announced pricing and availability for its Office for Mac 2011 software suite.

The version of the Office suite for users of Apple's Mac computers is scheduled for release via retail outlets at the end of October, in two editions: Office for Mac Home and Business 2011, and Office for Mac Home and Student 2011.

"For better alignment across platforms," Microsoft said in a statement, "the Office 2011 pricing and edition options map closer with Office for the Windows operating system."

The software titan also said that anyone buying Office 2008 for Mac … Read more

REDMOND, Wash.--Aiming to show it is still winning customers against Google, Microsoft on Thursday announced deals to provide hosted e-mail and portal software to three big corporate customers.

The software maker said Dow Chemical, Hyatt Hotels, and the University of Georgia are all using the company's hosted e-mail and portal software, known as Microsoft Online. The announcements were timed to come just as Microsoft is set to host its financial analyst meeting here. (I'll be covering the day-long event live, starting around 8 a.m. PT)

In an interview, Hyatt CIO Mike Blake said the company, which … Read more

After adding conversation view to the latest PC version of Office, Microsoft confirmed on Wednesday that it is adding the feature to the next version of Mac Office, which is coming later this year.

As part of a series of videos previewing Office for Mac 2011 that Microsoft is releasing on Wednesday, the company showed the new e-mail threading view as well as the ribbon-style interface and a new template gallery that will be part of the new Office. Conversation threading has long been a selling point of Google's Gmail, but Microsoft has been steadily adding it to products … Read more

Stephen Baker, NPD Group's vice president of industry analytics, on Tuesday called the first two weeks of sales for Microsoft's Office 2010 product "a bit disappointing."

The group's findings, which stem from its Weekly Tracking Service, were posted to NPD's company blog on Tuesday, and show that both the number of units sold and the money made from Office 2010 are less than they were for the first two weeks of sales for Office 2007. However, the findings also show that Microsoft is "in line, and in fact slightly ahead of" the … Read more