Microsoft has added a new component to their online context-sensitive help system for Office 97. When you press the <F1> help key, Office 97 will pop-up a small window that display an animated character. The default character is Clippit, but you can select other guides. The system will also display a light yellow dialog bubble, that contains a short description of the context or some suggested help topic links. When you choose a topic link, the Office Assistant will open the standard Winhelp topic window.

You can also choose to have the Office Assistant running all the time. In this mode, Office Assistant will watch your activity and sometimes pop-up a help bubble with some information related to your current activity. When you open some dialog boxes, Word will display an Office Assistant help bubble, but this only occurred with some of the new dialog boxes, like the letter wizard. This picture of Clippit was reduced to 16 colors to reduce the file size. Normally the help topic bubble is a light yellow.

Word also includes some interesting new wizards, like the letter wizard shown in the following screen shot. Just as the business letter is quickly disappearing as a means of business communication, Microsoft suddenly made it easier to type a letter.