Office Assistant - Overview

Overview

Office Assistant was codenamed TFC during development, and was enabled by default in early Microsoft Office versions. It popped up when the program determined the user could be assisted with using Office wizards, searching help, or advising users on using Office features more effectively. It presented tips and keyboard shortcuts. For example, typing an address followed by "Dear" would cause Clippit to pop up and say, "It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help?"

Other Office assistants were available, such as The Dot (a shape-shifting and colour-shifting smiley-faced red ball), Hoverbot (a robot), The Genius (a caricature of Albert Einstein), Office Logo (a jigsaw puzzle), Mother Nature (a globe), Scribble (an origami-esque cat), Power Pup (a superhero dog) and Will (a caricature of William Shakespeare). In later versions of Microsoft Office for Windows, the Hoverbot, Scribble and Power Pup assistants were replaced by F1, Links and Rocky (a robot, a cat and a dog respectively). Clippit and the Office Logo were also included, but in a different form. In many cases the Office installation CD was necessary to activate a different Office assistant character, so the default character, Clippit, remains widely known. An assistant named Max, in the shape of a 1986 Macintosh Plus, served as the default on Mac versions of Office.

The Microsoft Office XP Multilingual Pack had two more assistants, Saeko Sensei (冴子先生?) (an animated secretary) and a version of Monkey King (孫悟空?) for Asian language users in non-Asian Office versions. Native language versions provided additional representations such as Kairu the dolphin, in Japanese. Clippit inspired parody software such as Vigor, a version of the vi text editor with a paperclip.