Microsoft Office

Microsoft today announced that its chemistry add-in for Word is now freely available for download and tweaking by the open-source community.

The tool, which was released in beta form in March of last year and has since been downloaded 250,000 times, lets users create and modify chemical information inside of Word 2007 and 2010. This includes chemical formulas, labels, and 2D structures that can more easily be worked on than with Word's standard formatting tools.

Also known as Chem4Word, the add-in was developed through a partnership between Microsoft Research and three professors at the University of Cambridge. As … Read more

A Microsoft press event held last week in Redmond under the name "The Future of Productivity Council" wasn't about introducing new and exciting products. But the day-long event Friday did give us a closer look at how Microsoft develops productivity software and also allowed us to hear from several Microsoft executives about what they are trying to accomplish in the productivity sphere.

The first half of the day we watched presentations by various team leaders at Microsoft discussing how productivity products are made and about our slow evolution towards cloud computing.

Gary Heil, the founder of the … Read more

Microsoft might not be selling Office in the Mac App Store now, but that doesn't mean it never will.

"It's something we are looking at," Microsoft's Amanda Lefebvre told All Things Digital's Mobilized blog in an interview yesterday. "It's something we haven't ruled out. We just have to see how that relates to our business."

The Mac App Store, which launched earlier this month, could provide Microsoft with another viable outlet to profit on its productivity suite on the Mac. However, there would be consequences to such an action.

For … Read more

Microsoft today has added a free, 30-day trial version of its Office for Mac software to coincide with this year's Macworld Expo, taking place later this week in San Francisco.

Since the release of Office for Mac 2011 in October of last year, the only way to give the product a spin was to visit a retailer with a copy installed, or to purchase it. Now users can download the 600MB trial from Microsoft's Office site, which contains full versions of all its applications. When the trial expires, users can then upgrade to either the Home and Student, … Read more

In an important step towards making its note-taking and notebook-authoring service available in more places, Microsoft today has released a pocket-sized version of its OneNote application for Apple's iOS.

The software lets users make things like bulleted lists and checklists, as well as grab and insert photos from the user's photo library or the camera app. All these things can be combined into one note with a slightly modified version of the iOS keyboard that adds feature shortcuts just above the keys.

OneNote Mobile for iOS shares a similar feature set to its cousin on Windows Phone 7, … Read more

Microsoft today unveiled five new plans for its Office 365 suite aimed at giving educational institutions access to hosted Office services, as well as a licensed version of the Office software.

The educational version of Microsoft's Office 365 service, which Microsoft says will be available to K-12 institutions later this year, runs from a free plan that brings things like Web e-mail and antivirus protection, all the way to a $17-per-month plan that includes VoIP and a license to MS Office Professional Plus for faculty and staff. This top-end plan can be had by students for $5 a month: … Read more

Microsoft is now providing e-mail, calendaring, and instant-messaging programs for students of the State University of New York.

SUNY's 64 campuses are part of a university-wide Live@edu agreement that covers more than 465,000 students with Microsoft's online productivity suite. Besides the aforementioned tools, this includes things like online storage, video conferencing, and access to Microsoft's Office Web Apps--all of which are offered up free of charge.

In a post yesterday announcing the rollout, Microsoft U.S. Education CTO Cameron Evans said that the deal is saving Monroe Community College--one of the SUNY schools involved with … Read more

In what can be considered a small victory for those who dislike additional security checks after purchasing software, Microsoft has quietly discontinued the use of its Genuine Advantage checker tool for Microsoft Office.

The antipiracy measure, called Office Genuine Advantage (OGA), required that users verify the legitimacy of their Office software before being able to download add-ons and templates from Microsoft, as well as download software updates Microsoft deemed "non-critical."

The OGA program had been put into place in late 2006 as a follow-up to Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage tool, which does similar checks to make sure … Read more

The U.S. Department of Agriculture this morning announced that it has chosen Microsoft to host things like e-mail, instant messaging, and collaboration through the software giant's Business Productivity Online Suite.

As part of the deal, which covers 120,000 employees, the USDA will move from its own on-premises systems to Microsoft's Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Office Communications Online. That migration will be completed in four weeks, and will put the USDA's cloud hardware in a secured facility that Microsoft says will be in compliance with the International Traffic in Arms Regulations.

Prior to the move, … Read more