MICROSOFT NICKED WITH EXCEL PATENT CLAIM - The US District Court of Central California court ruled that Microsoft had infringed Guatamalan inventor Carlos Armando Amado's patent and was ordered to pay almost $9m in damages. This figure relates to software sold between March 1997 and July 2003.

In a sense, Microsoft can breathe a sigh of relief, as the $9m is a far cry from the $500m originally being asked for. The jury rejected nine out of ten claims made by Amado.

In 1990 Carlos Armando Amado filed a patent for software which helped transfer data between Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft's Access database using a single spreadsheet. He said he tried to sell this technology to Microsoft in 1992 but they turned him down. According to Amado, Microsoft started including his software in their releases between 1995 and 2002.

So for now, Microsoft can go back to defending the other 60-or-so patent infringement lawsuits being asserted against it, including claims over Longhorn (from networking company Alacritech), as well as the battle with Forgent Networks, which claims the software giant infringed its JPEG picture compression patent.