Microsoft Office 4.5
I've noticed on WinWorld there's two copies of a 'Microsoft Office 4.5' available for download both in English and German. As I've only ever seen 4.2 Standard and 4.3 Professional over the years, I checked them out. Both are actually a German version of 4.2c Standard with one download having the disks imaged, while the other has the disk contents in folders.
Comments
It never really hit me how screwpot Microsoft got those Office 4.x version numbers. As far as I can tell 4.3 was only available as a "professional" edition, and they continued to sell 4.2 as the "standard" edition, with the only difference being 4.3 included Access 2.0. I'm guessing they did that because of the Mac version, which never had Access.
Apparently there was never a 4.1 version?
I might do some more cleaning up on that page, and perhaps seperate the 4.0/4.2/4.3 versions.
I suspect 4.2 was used like you said to minimise confusion and to be easily recognised as the Standard edition on both platforms, while 4.3 being the point of difference. 4.1 may also have been missed for the fact that Excel and Powerpoint had a major update from Office 4.0 to warrant skipping a digit.
I thought Microsoft releasing Office for NT 4.2 was interesting, as back in the heydays of Windows 3.x/NT 3.x I never did see anyone have it or see it for sale. Maybe it just wasn't released in Australia. While I could see it being beneficial at the time to have a 32-bit Excel 5.0, I'm not as convinced with Word 6.0. I sometimes wonder why they went with this, and hadn't made Access 2.0 32-bit instead. It does to me seem a bit haphazard with 16-bit Powerpoint thrown in, maybe it was a rushed release while they were focusing on developing Office 95.
Word and Excel 97 were ported to Alpha, but not PowerPoint. I'm pretty sure DEC did the Alpha port, and deemed PowerPoint not important/hard to port to Alpha. (MS did the later 32-bit x86/MacPPC version)