Office Assistant

A screenshot of the Office Assistant Clippit in Microsoft Office 97.

Office Assistant is a discontinued feature for Microsoft Office that assisted users by using interactive animated characters. It was included in Microsoft Office 97, 2000, XP and 2003. The default character was Clippit the paperclip for most releases of Microsoft Office, with some international releases having different characters as the default. Office Assistant was turned on by default in Office 97 and Office 2000 before being disabled in Office XP and eventually removed in the release of Office 2007.

Assistants

Microsoft Actor

• Clippit
• Dot
• Genius
• Hoverbot
• Office Logo
• Mother Nature
• PowerPup
• Scribble
• Will
• Kairu (Japanese version)
• Saeko-Sensei (Japanese version)

Microsoft Agent

• Clippit
• Dot
• Genius (until Office XP)
• F1
• Office Logo
• Mother Nature
• Links
• Rocky
• Monkey King (Chinese version)
• Kairu (Japanese version)
• Saeko-Sensei (Japanese version)

Trivia

• It came bundled with Office 97 through 2003.
• It was discontinued after Office 2007.
• It is possible that the Office Assistant feature lead to the eventual discontinuation of Microsoft Agent.
• It is unknown why the Genius character was removed by default in Office XP.
• The Chinese and Japanese versions of Microsoft had three exclusive characters total.