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The Office Assistant is a feature included in Microsoft Office starting with Office 97, and has been dubbed "Clippy" or "Clippit" after its default animated paperclip representation. However, Clippit is actually the default assistant's official name. This feature is an entry point to the application's help system, presenting various search functions based on Bayesian algorithms in Office versions 97-2002 on Windows and 98-2004 on the Macintosh. Starting in Office 2000 Microsoft Agent (.ACS) replaced the earlier Microsoft Bob-descended Actor (.ACT) format as the technology supporting the feature. Clippit was allegedly designed and developed by a Computer Science student intern from the University of Waterloo.
Animated representations other than Clippit are available, such as The Dot (a shapeshifting and colour-shifting smiley or red ball), F-1 (a robot), The Genius (a caricature of Albert Einstein), Office Logo (jigsaw puzzle), Mother Nature (a globe), Links (a cat) and Rocky (a dog). In many cases the Office CD is necessary to activate a different office assisant character, so Clippit, the default setting, has remained the most widely known, especially among users who may be using a pirated or shared edition of Word. In the editions which use Agent, users can add other .ACS files to set locations for them to show up as selectable assistants. The Office assistant is also present in the Mac OS versions of Office, starting with Office 98, with a Mac-only assistant named Max, in the shape of a Macintosh Plus, serving as the default (although Clippit remains available).
Clippit was enabled by default in some versions of Microsoft Office, and came to be loathed by many users. It would pop open whenever the program thought the user could use its advice, and frequently the advice was unnecessary or useless in its context. Famously, typing an address followed by "Dear" would prompt Clippit to pop-up and say "It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help?" This behaviour was parodied by a well-known internet video in which a large paperclip repeatedly asking this question sits beside a man at his keyboard.
During Office 97 product development, The Office Assistant had many detractors within Microsoft as well. In fact, the source code in Office refers to The Office Assistant as TFC. The acronym originates from a comment by Bill Gates during a product review meeting, where he referred to the Assistant as "The Fucking Clown". Microsoft Office programmers ironically used the derisive term in their code, though referred to the Assistant via the pseudonymous title, "The Friendly Character".
One of the key elements of Microsoft's advertising campaign for Office XP was the removal of Clippit and the Office Assistant from the software, although in reality it was simply disabled by default. It is also still available in Office 2003, though this version went a step further and did not install the Office Assistant by default. The self-effacing campaign included the now-defunct website officeclippy.com (still viewable at archive.org), which featured the animated adventures of Clippit (voiced by comedian Gilbert Gottfried, who is famous for his intentionally annoying voice) as he learned to cope with unemployment ("X... XP... As in, ex-paperclip?!").
The Microsoft Office XP Multilingual Pack provides two additional representations, Saeko Sensei, an animated secretary, and a version of the Monkey King for Asian customers. Clippit has inspired takeoffs such as Vigor, a version of the vi text editor with a paperclip providing unhelpful "help".
As of Office 2004, the Mac OS versions of Microsoft Office retain the Office Assistant in the default installation, with Max remaining as the default assistant. Unlike its Windows counterparts, Max is confined to a small floating window in which a lightbulb in the corner indicated that advice would be available.
As of Office 2007, Microsoft has removed the Office Assistant feature in favor of a new help system.
External links
"Office Assistant"