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. Starting in Office 2000 Microsoft Agent (.ACS) replaced the earlier Microsoft Bob-descended Actor (.ACT) format as the technology supporting the feature.

Animated representations other than Clippy were available, such as The Dot, F-1, The Genius, Office Logo, Mother Nature, Links and Rocky. 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 is the most widely known. On Mac versions of Office, a Macintosh shaped assistant is available.

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 either the advice was not really required or it was not really useful. 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 it was still present if the user enabled it. (It is also still available in Office 2003.) The campaign included the now-defunct website officeclippy.com, 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.

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".

External links

• Microsoft Office Online Home Page
• Luke Swartz - Why People Hate the Paperclip -- Academic paper on why people hate the Office Assistant
• Vigor -- Vigor Assistant, a comical addon to Unix editor vi.]
• Mug shots of the Evil Clippit -- Comical 'mug shots' of Clippy]