Microsoft Office 97 (version 8.0) is the fifth major release for Windows of

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, MS Office, or simply Office, is an office suite and family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. The first version of the Office suite, announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at CO ...

, released by Microsoft on November 19, 1996. A Mac OS equivalent,

Microsoft Office 98 Macintosh Edition Microsoft Office 98 Macintosh Edition is a version of Microsoft Office for the classic Mac OS, unveiled at Macworld Expo/San Francisco on January 6, 1998. It introduced the Internet Explorer 4.0 browser and Outlook Express, an Internet e-mail clie ...

, was released on January 6, 1998. Microsoft Office 97 became a major

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release for introducing new features and improvements over its predecessor

Microsoft Office 95 Microsoft Office 95 (version 7.0) is the fourth major release of the Microsoft Office office suite for Windows systems, released by Microsoft on August 24, 1995. It is the successor to both Office 4.2 and 4.3 and it bumps up the version number ...

. The suite is officially compatible with Windows NT 3.51 SP5 through

Windows Me Windows Me (Millennium Edition) is an operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was the successor to Windows 98, and was released to manufacturing on June 19, 2000, and t ...

. It is the last version of Microsoft Office to support Windows NT 3.51 SP5 and

Windows NT 4.0 Windows NT 4.0 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft, targeting the data server and personal workstation markets. It is the direct successor to Windows NT 3.51, and was released to manufacturing on July 3 ...

RTM–SP2. Two Service Releases (SR-1 and SR-2) have been released for Office 97; SR-2 solves the

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in Office 97. Hotfix support for Office 97 ended on February 28, 2002, while assisted support options and security updates ended on January 16, 2004.

Features

Office 97 introduced "Command Bars", a paradigm in which menus and toolbars are made more similar in capability and visual design. It also featured natural language systems and sophisticated grammar checking. Office 97 introduced 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 ...

, an interactive animated character designed to assist users via Office help content. The default assistant is "Clippit", nicknamed "Clippy", a paperclip. Office 97 is the first

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product to include

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, albeit limited to the

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ian editions of Office 97 Small Business Edition and

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. An option to upgrade to Internet Explorer 3.02 came with the Office Professional version, though the icon would not appear if the browser was already installed. Two Office 97 applications feature

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s: a hidden

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game in

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and a hidden

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Microsoft Excel Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet editor developed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows, Windows, macOS, Android (operating system), Android, iOS and iPadOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a ...

. Office 97 supported

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.https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd000509.shtml

Editions

Office 97 has been released in five editions: Standard Edition, Professional Edition, Small Business Edition, Small Business Edition 2.0, and Developer Edition. Each has its own selection of included applications.

Notes

References

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