Microsoft Office 95

Microsoft Office 95 was a version of Microsoft Office designed specifically for Windows 95. It was released on August 24, 1995 and was succeeded by Microsoft Office 97. It had six applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Schedule+, and Binder. It was discontinued on December 31, 2001.

Features
Microsoft Office 95 includes six applications: Word (a word processor), Excel (a spreadsheet), PowerPoint (a presentation program), Access (a database management system), Schedule+ (a time management app) and Binder (a program for binding the work of the mentioned apps together). The CD-ROM version also includes Microsoft Bookshelf.

True to its namesake, this suite is designed specifically for Windows 95. Previously, Microsoft had released Office 4.2 for Windows NT for several architectures,[6] which included 32‑bit Word 6.0 for Windows NT and Excel 5.0 for Windows NT,[7] but PowerPoint 4.0 was 16‑bit. With Office for Windows 95, all components in the suite were 32-bit. All the Office 95 programs are OLE 2-enabled, meaning that they allow interoperability between themselves, as well as all other applications that support this data interchange protocol. Binder used this protocol to bind OLE objects together.[3]

Office for Windows 95 bears version number 7.0 to match Word's version number. Other components also bear the same version numbers to show that they are contemporaries, although their predecessors were not version 6.0. The previous versions of components were Word 6.0, Excel 5.0, PowerPoint 4.0, Schedule+ 1.0 and Access 2.0. Binder was a new app at the time with no predecessor.

Microsoft Excel contained an easter egg, a hidden Doom–like game called Hall of Tortured Souls crediting the application's writers.

Contemporary components
Several additional programs were "compatible with Microsoft Office 95": Other contemporary Microsoft products were:
 * Microsoft Project for Windows 95 (Version 4.1a)
 * Microsoft Publisher for Windows 95 (Version 3.0)
 * Microsoft FrontPage 1.1
 * Office Small Business Pack for Office 95
 * Microsoft Works 4.0
 * Microsoft Money 4.0

Editions
Computer icons of the components Microsoft Office 95 Pro: From left to right, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Schedule+ and Binder

Office 95 was available in two versions. They contained the following applications:[8]

Updates
There were no downloadable service packs or service releases for Office for Windows 95. Instead, two updated versions, 7.0a[16] and 7.0b[1] were released to fix bugs in the application (the only difference between 7.0a and 7.0b was a fix for a screen redraw problem in PowerPoint). The updates could be ordered from Microsoft Support. A downloadable update was released in 1999 to address minor year 2000 problems.[17]

Issues
Versions 3.0 and 3.5 of the Microsoft Jet database engine, used by Access for Windows 95 (Access 7.0) and the later released Access 97 respectively, had a critical issue which made these versions of Access unusable on a computer with more than 1 GB of memory.[18] While this problem was fixed for Jet 3.5/Access 97, it was never fixed for Jet 3.0 or Access 95.

System requirements
Microsoft Office 95 requires a 386DX or higher CPU, and either Windows 95 or Windows NT 3.51. It also requires 8 MB of RAM for typical use. Regarding hard disk space, compact installations require 28 MB, "typical" installations require 55 MB, and full installations require 88 MB.[2]