Office is commonly defined as a suite of programs made by Microsoft. They can accomplish many daily tasks, and are one of the most commonly used programs of average computer people.

There are several programs in the Microsoft Office suite:

• Access, a database program
• Excel, a spreadsheet program
• Outlook, an email program
• PowerPoint, a presentation program
• Word, a word processor
• Publisher, a document publishing program

Also part of the Microsoft Office suite are: Expression Web a web publishing program that replaced Microsoft's FrontPage a discontinued Web site software, and Visio, a diagram making program.

Office suites are not made only by Microsoft. Some companies have taken their own stab at making these handy bundles of programming, and many have succeeded. If you don't want to shell out serious cash (hundreds of US dollars) for the latest version of Microsoft Office, you should take a look at OpenOffice.org, commonly known as OOo or OpenOffice, a free, open-source office suite which offers almost all the features of Microsoft Office and then some. KDE e.V. also makes an office suite for KDE called Koffice. If you wish to have an alternative to Word, try AbiWord.

Several online services like Google Docs also let you create and edit office programs.

Once you learn how to use one office program, you can figure out the basics of the other ones without much effort.