Microsoft Office 2000

Microsoft Office 2000 is a release of Microsoft Office, an office suite for Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. Released to manufacturing on March 29, 1999 and shipped on June 7, 1999, it succeeded Microsoft Office 97 and preceded Microsoft Office XP. It comes in five different editions, the most comprehensive of which is Office 2000 Developer.

Microsoft Office 2000 was designed as a fully 32-bit suite of software developed with Y2k bug in mind. All the Office 2000 applications support Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) which allows moving data automatically between various programs.

Office 2000 was the first version of Office to use Windows Installer technology. This allowed service packs to be slipstreamed into the original installation files. The first update was called Service Release 1 (SR-1). Subsequent updates were called service packs. Service Pack 3, which was released on October 21, 2002, was the last service pack.

All retail editions of Office 2000 sold in Australia, Brazil, China, France, and New Zealand and academic copies sold in Canada and the United States required the user to activate the product via the Internet. In the United States, after the release of SR-1, this requirement was extended to all copies that included it. Product activation is however disabled in Office 2000 after April 15, 2003.

Microsoft Office 2000 had easter eggs, most of which was removed from SR-1. For example, Microsoft Excel contained a hidden game called Dev Hunter; Microsoft Access had a hidden 8 ball toy; and Microsoft Word had team development credits.

Mainstream support for Office 2000 ended on June 30, 2004, and extended support ended on July 14, 2009.

Editions
Five different editions of Office 2000 were available:

Microsoft Office 2000 Personal was an additional SKU, solely designed for the Japanese market, that included Word 2000, Excel 2000 and Outlook 2000. This compilation would later become widespread as Microsoft Office 2003 Basic.