Microsoft Office 97

Microsoft Office 97 was a major milestone release of Microsoft Office, which included hundreds of new features and improvements, introduced "Command Bars", a paradigm in which menus and toolbars were made more similar in capability and visual design featured natural language systems and sophisticated grammar checking. It was published on CD-ROM as well as on a set of 44 3½-inch floppy disks, and became Y2K safe with Service Release 2. Released on November 19, 1996, it was the last version to support Windows NT 3.51 on i386 and Alpha (only Word and Excel were available for the Alpha). Two service releases (SR-1 and SR-2) were released for Office 97.

Microsoft Office 97 is notable as the first version of Office to feature the Office Assistant, a feature initially designed to assist users by the way of an interactive animated character, which interfaced with the Office help content. The default assistant was Clippit, nicknamed Clippy, a paperclip. The office assistant feature would continue to be available in Office versions up until and including Microsoft Office 2003. In Office XP the feature was hidden by default and not installed by default in Office 2003.

Office 97 is also notable for being the first Microsoft product to include product activation. The Brazilian versions of Office 97 Small Business Edition and Publisher 98 required it.

Microsoft Word 97 contained a hidden pinball game and Microsoft Excel contained a hidden flight simulator.

Assisted support options and security updates for Office 97 ended on January 16, 2004. Mainstream hotfix support for Office 97 ended on August 31, 2001. Extended hotfix support ended on February 28, 2002.

Editions
Office 97 was released in five editions. They are as follows:

Additionally, Microsoft Office 97 Powered by Word 98 was released in Japanese and Korean editions on 20 June 1998. It also included Outlook 98 in all editions and Publisher 98 in the Small Business Edition. Microsoft Word 98 for Windows was only available as part of this package, though Microsoft Word 98 for Macintosh was available in Microsoft Office 98 Macintosh Edition.