In a Microsoft Office application, what is the area at the bottom of the application screen that contains information about the document?

Status Bar

Explanation:

A status bar is a horizontal window at the bottom of a application screen. The status bar is the section at the bottom of the window comprising information about the current document. An application can show several kinds of status information. It can be divided into parts to group and display information. Additionally in MS office applications like MS Word it also shows information about page such as page, line and character number of the document you are working on.

Its basic purpose is to display information about the current state of its window or document, however some status bars have additional functionality such as useful keyboard shortcuts.

For example In MS Word, the status bar displays cursor position, the number of pages in the document, caps lock state and keys like num and scroll lock. Furthermore, status bar shows the state of the insertion mode toggle. In MS Excel the status bar displays average, sum, maximum value, and also highlights the cells in addition to displaying same information as that of MS Word.