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Microsoft Office shared tools

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Microsoft Office shared tools are software components that are (or were) included in all Microsoft Office products.

Clip Organizer

Microsoft Clip Organizer is Microsoft's clip art organizing software to find drawings, photographs, sounds, videos, and other media clips with presentations, publications, and other Office documents. It is also comes with a variety of stock media clips and offers more selection on the Microsoft Office Online website as well.

Microsoft Graph

Microsoft Graph (also known as Microsoft Chart) is an OLE application that is deployed by a number of the Microsoft Office programs such as Excel and Access to create charts and graphs. The program can also be hosted as an OLE application object in Visual Basic. Microsoft Graph supports many different types of charts, however, it is a legacy application and the charts produced are not modern-looking and polished. Office 2003 was the last version to use Microsoft Graph for hosting charts inside Microsoft Office applications as OLE objects. Office 2007, specifically, Excel 2007 includes a new integrated high-quality charting engine and the charts created are native to the applications. The new engine supports advanced formatting, including 3D rendering, transparencies and shadows. Chart layouts can also be customized to highlight various trends in the data. Microsoft Graph still exists for compatibility reasons, but the entry points are removed.

History

The first software sold, under the name Microsoft Chart, was an attempt from Microsoft to compete with the successful Lotus 1-2-3 by adding a companion to Microsoft Multiplan, the company's spreadsheet in the early 1980s.

Ms/Chart shared with Multiplan the box design and the two lines menu at the bottom of the screen, and could import Multiplan data. The simple graphs (pies, bars, lines) were drawn on the screen by switching the display mode of the IBM PC Compatibles to graphics (which was not available to entry level models), or could be printed on some dot matrix devices.

The main drawback of the Microsoft Corporation solution at this time was the necessity to quit the spreadsheet and then load Ms/Chart to compose and draw a graph, as MS/DOS was not a multitasking operating system. Thus, Lotus 1-2-3 maintained its market share until the release of Microsoft Excel by Microsoft.

In the early 1990s, Microsoft Chart was renamed to Microsoft Graph.

Equation Editor

Equation Editor is a formula editor developed by Design Science that allows users to construct math and science equations in a WYSIWYG environment. Equation Editor was developed by Design Science and is included in Microsoft Office and several other commercial applications. It is a simplified version of Design Science MathType. It can be used as a standalone program or it can also be used from within applications that support OLE as an embedded object. Its feature set has not changed significantly since its introduction in Word for Windows, version 2.0.

In certain Microsoft Office 2007 applications (including Word), and in all Microsoft Office 2010 applications, Equation Editor is no longer the default method of creating equations, and is kept for compatibility with old documents only[1]. Instead, a reengineered equation editor is included, which is built into the document-editing part of the interface rather than being operated through a separate dialog and being treated as an OLE object in the document.[2]

Picture Manager

Main article: Microsoft Office Picture Manager

WordArt

The formatting effects as seen in Office 2010 and 2007

WordArt is a text-styling feature that is available in the Microsoft Office suite of products. It allows users to create stylized text with various "special effects" such as textures, outlines, and many other manipulations that are not available through the standard font formatting. For example, one can create shadows, rotate, "bend" and "stretch" the shape of the text. WordArt is available in 30 different preset styles on Microsoft Word, however, it is fully customisable using the tools available on the WordArt toolbar and Drawing toolbar, or on the WordArt tools tab on Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Office 2010. It is also available in Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Publisher. WordArt in Microsoft Office 2010, users can apply formatting effects such as shadow, bevel, glow, gradient glow, and reflection to their text.

In Office 2007, WordArt was given a complete overhaul in Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint, with new styles, new effects and the ability to apply WordArt to regular text boxes. The new styles have been included in Microsoft Word 2010. As well as this, Office 2010 includes the new PowerPoint & Excel styles in Microsoft Word, replacing the old versions.

Discontinued

Microsoft Binder

Microsoft Binder was an application originally included with Microsoft Office 95, 97 and 2000 designed to allow users to include several different types of OLE 2.0 objects (e.g., Microsoft Word documents, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and Microsoft PowerPoint presentations) integrated in one file. Originally a test host for OLE 2.0, it was not widely used, and was discontinued after Office 2000.

The filename extension for Microsoft Binder files was .OBD, and the Office binder template format was .OBT. A Microsoft Office Binder Wizard used the extension .OBZ.

Binder files can still be opened in later versions of Microsoft Office up until version 2003, with the Microsoft Binder Support add-in, called Unbind which can be installed through the Add and Remove programs menu, by selecting Microsoft Office, click change, add it and update. According to Microsoft, Unbind is not included with Office 2007. However, Office 97 Unbind is available for download from the Microsoft website.[3]

Microsoft Data Analyzer

Microsoft Data Analyzer 2002 was a data analysis software for Microsoft Office XP. Microsoft originally purchased the software as part of an acquisition of the intellectual property of Maximal Innovative Intelligence - Maximal had a product called "Max" which was rebranded as Microsoft Data Analyzer. The developers behind Microsoft Data Analyzer have been working in Office since the acquisition and are currently working on Excel Services[4][5] Even though it was a stand alone application and was not available in any Office XP bundle, it was a part of the Office XP suite. However, it was not updated beyond version 3.5.[6]

Microsoft Data Analyzer allows analyzing and visualizing data and data trends, and is integrated with SQL Server Analysis Services. Reports and graphs generated could be saved as HTML, Microsoft Excel or Microsoft PowerPoint files.

Microsoft Office Document Imaging

Main article: Microsoft Office Document Imaging

Microsoft Office Document Scanning

Microsoft Office Document Scanning (MODS) is a scanning and Optical character recognition (OCR) software application introduced first in Office XP. The OCR engine is based upon Nuance's OmniPage. Microsoft Office Document Scanning is suited for creating archival copies of documents.

Microsoft Office Document Scanning is closely tied with Microsoft Office Document Imaging, the application that manipulates Microsoft Document Imaging Format (MDI) files. The application can also create TIFF files.

Notably, this application can also embed OCR data into both MDI and TIFF files. This enables some sort of automated text searchability on the files, which is integrated into the Windows shell Search function.

Microsoft Office Document Scanning, like Office Document Imaging is no longer available in Office 2010.

Office Assistant

Main article: Office Assistant

Microsoft PhotoDraw

Main article: Microsoft PhotoDraw

Microsoft Photo Editor

Main article: Microsoft Photo Editor

Office Web Components

Office Web Components (OWC) are a group of Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) components (allows embedding and linking to documents) implemented as ActiveX control in Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003. These ActiveX Controls can be plugged into web pages, Visual Basic and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) forms, Windows Forms or programmed in-memory. The OWC can be used by any COM-compliant Component Object Model programming language. Applications like Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access and Microsoft FrontPage allowed creating interactive web pages using Office Web Components.

The following components are included:

  • Spreadsheet
  • Chartspace
  • Pivot table
  • Data source component

The Office Web Components have been discontinued in Office 2007, and are not included, except as a part of Office Project Server 2007.[7] However, they will still be available for download from Microsoft's website. Microsoft has not yet offered a complete replacement for the Office Web Components. However, programmers can use a combination of third party products, Excel Services or Visual Studio Tools for Office to provide similar functionality.

The Pivot Table web component does not function on Windows 7.[8]

There are currently four books in print on programming the OWC.

  • The O.W.C Black Book 2nd Edition - Alvin Bruney 2007
  • The Microsoft Office Web Components Black Book with .NET - Alvin Bruney 2005
  • Professional ASP Programming Guide for Office Web Components: With Office 2000 and Office XP - Qimao Zhang 2001
  • Programming Microsoft Office 2000 Web Components - Dave Stearns 2000


References

  1. ^ http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/where-is-equation-editor-HA101988786.aspx
  2. ^ High-quality editing and display of mathematical text in Office 2007
  3. ^ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=bb8ef813-80e3-493f-a914-7add36d84b8a&displaylang=en Office 97 Unbind]
  4. ^ [1]
  5. ^ [2]
  6. ^ [3]
  7. ^ David Gainer (July 17, 2006). "Office Web Components "Roadmap"". Microsoft Excel 2007 (nee Excel 12). MSDN Blogs. Retrieved 2006-09-10.
  8. ^ Webpage on Windows 7 does not render the OWC Pivot Table
Equation Editor
WordArt
Binder
Microsoft Data Analyzer
Office Web Components
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