Microsoft Word, the most famous word processing software ever, is turning 18 this month.On this occasion, Microsoft Presspass carries an interview with Peter Pathe, the main guy behind Microsoft Word since 1993.
Peter frankly admits that the animated Office Assistant or the Clippy feature introduced with Word 97 didn't go down well with the users.
We knew that we needed to make Word easier to use and the features more accessible to more people. But it turns out a cartoon paper clip asking if you wanted help with that letter to Mom wasn’t always as welcome as we had hoped it would be.Word Clippy would pop open whenever the program thought the user could use its advice, and frequently the advice was unnecessary or useless in its context. Peter agreed that the feature was more annoying than helpful:
Great people worked on these features, but at the end of the day we needed to make them less obtrusive or simply not have shipped them in the form we did.GUIdebook has a list of Microsoft Word splash screens right from version 1.1.
As of Office 2007, Microsoft has removed the Office Assistant feature in favor of a new help system that searches Microsoft Office Online website for the most recent version of Office help. There's also an option to search offline help.
Reader Comments
If I only had a dime for every time I had an end user ask me to add the office assistant and then for the next 30 minutes or so...go through each one...showing all the animations they do...hehe.
To be honest...I enjoyed waisting time doing this...as the user was usually one of the hotties in the office :P
Written on 5/1/07 2:51 AM
No bones about it...clippy was a bad idea.
Written on 5/1/07 5:21 AM
Clippy was bad. But Rocky and Links are good. Any configuration that can bring in Rocky?
Written on 7/1/07 9:43 AM
I'll miss the Office Assistant. It kept me company during downtime. It also made using help functions easier. I'm not as motivated to read long text entries. I think alot of people who didn't like the Office Assistant should've just turned it off and let it go at that.
Written on 18/1/07 8:16 PM