Microsoft Office 97 (version 8.0) is the fifth major release for Windows of Microsoft Office, released by Microsoft on November 19, 1996. It succeeded Microsoft Office 95 and was replaced by Microsoft Office 2000 in 1999. A Mac OS equivalent, Microsoft Office 98 Macintosh Edition, was released on January 6, 1998. Microsoft Office 97 became a major milestone release which includes hundreds of new features and improvements over its predecessor. The suite is officially compatible with

Windows NT 3.51 Windows NT 3.51 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It is the third version of Windows NT and was released on May 30, 1995, eight months following the release of Windows NT ...

SP5, Windows 95 or later. It is not officially supported on Windows XP or later versions of Windows. It is the last version of Microsoft Office to support

SP5 and Windows NT 4.0 RTM–SP2; as the following version, Microsoft Office 2000 only supports Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0 SP3 or later. Two Service Releases (SR-1 and SR-2) were released for Office 97; SR-2 solved the year 2000 problem in Office 97. Mainstream hotfix support for Office 97 ended on August 31, 2001, while extended hotfix support ended on February 28, 2002. Assisted support options and security updates for Office 97 ended on January 16, 2004.

Features

Office 97 introduced "Command Bars," a paradigm in which menus and toolbars were made more similar in capability and visual design. It also featured natural language systems and sophisticated grammar checking. Microsoft Office 97 is the first version of Office to feature the

Office Assistant The Office Assistant is a discontinued intelligent user interface for Microsoft Office that assisted users by way of an interactive animated character which user interface, interfaced with the Office help content. It was included in Microsoft Off ...

, a feature 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 was also included in its successor,

Office 2000 Microsoft Office 2000 (version 9.0) is a release of Microsoft Office, an office suite developed and distributed by Microsoft for the Windows family of operating systems. Office 2000 was released to manufacturing on March 29, 1999, and was made av ...

, as well as in Office XP (hidden by default) and

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(not installed by default), before being removed entirely in Office 2007. Office 97 is also the first Microsoft product to include product activation, albeit limited to the Brazilian editions of Office 97 Small Business Edition and Publisher. Two Office 97 applications featured easter eggs: Microsoft Word 97 contained a hidden pinball game and Microsoft Excel contained a hidden flight simulator.

Editions

Office 97 was released in five editions:

Notes

References

{{Authority control 1997 software Computer-related introductions in 1997 Office 97