Office Assistant

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(Redirected from Clippy)

Image:Clippy-letter.PNG 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. This feature is an entry point to the application's help system, presenting various search functions based on Bayesian algorithms in versions Office 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. Clippy was allegedly designed and developed by a Computer Science student intern from the University of Waterloo. Clippy will be discontinued in the yet to be released Office 2007.

Animated representations other than Clippy were 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 the editions which used Agent, users could add other .ACS files to set locations for them to show up as selectable assistants, but Clippy remains the most widely known. 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 Clippy remains available).

Image:Assistant.PNG Clippy 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 Clippy to pop-up and say "It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help?"

One of the key elements of Microsoft's advertising campaign for Office XP was the removal of Clippy 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 campaign included the now-defunct website officeclippy.com (still viewable at archive.org), which featured the animated adventures of Clippy (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. Clippy 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.

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