To understand what an office software suite is, we need to look at the word 'suite'. A suite (pronounced 'sweet') is a set of things that are designed to go together. So you can have a suite of rooms in a hotel, the furniture in a room can be designed as a suite, and you can even have a suite of music. (A set of clothes that go together is also a suite, but English drops the 'e' and calls it a suit of clothes - pronounced 'soote')

A software suite is a set of programs that are designed to work together. There are several different kinds of suite, but the commonest is the office suite. This is because when computers became small and cheap enough for general use, many companies purchased computers for their workers.

Before the office suite, there were already several programs available for office workers. You could get a program for quickly doing complicated sums using different numbers each time. (The program is called a spreadsheet, and a spreadsheet called Lotus 1-2-3 was so popular that some companies brought computers just to run this program.) Of course secretaries liked a replacement for the typewriter that let them correct their mistakes and change what they were writing. (This is a word-processing program. These are now so common that many typists have found other work, because their bosses have found that they can type for themselves!)

Small businesses liked being able to see what things had been brought or used, who their customers were, and how much they had been paid and needed to pay. This was done by a database, and today, some office suites include a special kind of database just for keeping track of money, spending and taxes.

But soon people discovered that life was a lot easier if they could put all these functions together in a way that allowed them to exchange data between them. Then the accounts despartment could use a spreadsheet to work out the annual bonus for the company's employees, they could add this information to the employees' details on the database, and write a letter to each employee with a word processing program.

Today with new functions such as XML making it easier than ever for programs to move data about, the future of the software suite has never been brighter.