Updated January 31, 2001: Dead links removed - no assistant humor anymore :-( FAQ has been moved to a page of it's own.
If you use Microsoft Office 97 on a regular basis, you probably have encountered the default Office Assistant, Clippit, who's there just to help you. Maybe you've also changed Clippit with one of the other regular assistants, such as Powerpup or Scribble. In case you don't have the Office 97 CD, the other regular assistants can be downloaded from http://officeupdate.microsoft.com/downloadCatalog/dldWord.htm, along with the four additional assistants provided for free by Microsoft: Kairu, F1, and Earl the Cat. Microsoft stopped releasing new Office 97 assistants after the release of Office 2000. Furthermore, Rocky has been removed from the download site in its Office 97 version - what a shame!
I know of no other sites for download than the official one - and please don't ask me for any (except for the NerdBird for Office 2000 - see below) - as I do not run Office 97 anymore. I do not have a copy of the original files, so I can't help you here either.
The Office Assistants were born at Fundamental Arts, now known as NetSage which has merged with Finali, who's created a very marketing-oriented, less techy page compared to the original Fundamental Arts site.
Office 2000 uses the Microsoft Agent ActiveX technology to power the assistants. This means, among other things, that you can create your own assistants for Office 2000! Isn't that cool? From July till November (1999) I spent plenty of time on this technology - I've written my final project about Agents & Assistants - so expect more information on this subject on these pages some time later!
The NerdBird assistant for Office 2000 is now available! Go here to read more - and get it!
Meanwhile, if you're interested in knowing more about Assistants and Actors in
Office 2000, check out the following sites:
Microsoft Developer Network
(MSDN) Agent Ressources and in particular the page about Designing Characters
for Microsoft Office. You also ought to download the free development tools, such as
the Character Editor and such. Information of such can be found at MSDN.
If MSDN is too busy, try download.com and search for Microsoft Agent - download the Agent ActiveX component (if you have Office 2000 installed, you
might not
need this particular one - that depends on your installation!) and everything else related (especially the
Agent Character editor - follow the related links on the page), and you're a great step
towards designing your own!
The assistants are almost constantly in motion, doing various things when you print, save or search'n'replace. Have you tried animating them randomly just for fun? Right-click the assistant and choose Animate! This way the system picks a random animation and lets the assistant perform it for you to see - fun to play with, when you're on hold on the phone for those next 17 minutes - just remember to turn down the volume - some of the assistants are pretty noisy!
You'll never know which animation the system is going to pick for you, when you just choose Animate! Some days, you'll see that Print-animation a thousand times without a glimpse of the Save-animation. Other days, the situation may be reversed. But, there is a solution:
Like everything else in the Office Suite, the assistants are objects with certain properties, which may easily be controlled directly with the built-in programming language, VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). Below, I'll explain how to do this yourself. If you don't want to try that programming stuff, you can download
This is a Word97 document, which enables you to view all the animations! You'll get a
form which lets you pick an assistant, set sound & size properties and test the
animations (notice: To some of the animations, more than one animated sequence is
assigned, so you won't necessarily get the same animated sequence every time you click an
animation button). You must remember to enable macros, or the program won't run! Get it: assistantcontrolpanel.zip (23k).
(In the text in the document I refer to a macro named assistenttest - this is not
a spelling error, it's just because it's originally written in Danish!)
Please note: This does NOT work in Office 2000!
This requires that you know a little about how to use the VBA-editor in Office97!
If you want to control the assistants yourself, you can easily do this with VBA. Build a
form where you use the following properties for the assistant object:
| Property | Description |
| Visible | Boolean. Shows the assistant. Rather essential! |
| Sounds | Boolean. Turns the sounds on and off. |
| FileName | The filename of the assistant. The assistants are saved as .act files. |
| Reduced | Boolean. Turns the size of the assistant on and off. Useful, because the assistant turns small after some time. |
| MoveWhenInTheWay | Boolean. Practical, but doesn't work especially good, unfortunately, as the assistant doesn't always know whether it's in the way or not. |
You can use the following animations:
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|
Notice that for some assistants, there are more than one animated sequence associated with some of the animations or some assistants do nothing for certain animations. Also notice that left and right is as seen from the assistant's point of view, not from your point of view!
VBA used to choose assistant
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VBA used to choose animation
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