Office 97

Microsoft Office 97 is a version of Microsoft Office, released in 1996 in a time range when also Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows NT 4.0 have been made available. The internal version number is 8.0. This version introduced Microsoft Outlook (not to be confused with Outlook Express) into the suite and massively expanded upon the feature set of applications, adding support for the new Internet world. Office 97 was the last to be offered on floppy disks.

The viewers for Word, Excel and PowerPoint have been released in 1997. At the time Office 97 has been released, the viewers were still in version 7.1, all released in 1995. The Word Viewer has been released as both a 32-bit and as a 16-bit version for Windows 3.1x. The 16-bit version, which is the last of the Word Viewer, will not install on Windows 95 and Windows NT and later, redirecting to the 32-version.

For Mac, Office 98 was released, adding features from 97 and more Mac-specific features. It was praised as an improvement over the 4.2 release on that platform, which was considered a sloppy Windows port and poorly received.

System requirements
The computer needs to have either Windows 95 or Windows NT 3.51 SP5 or later installed. However, some features require at least Windows NT 4.0, making usage on NT 3.51 a little bit limited.

Service Releases
Microsoft released two Service Releases for Office 97, one in 1997 and the other in 1998. Service Releases are similar to Service Packs for Windows and were used until Office 2000, as Office XP switched to Service Packs.

Office Assistant
This is the first version of Office to include animated Office Assistant characters based on the guides from Microsoft Bob. These are optional and can be deselected during Setup. These assistants became very unpopular, especially in businesses. Thus, many of these stayed on Office 95. The assistants were not disabled by default until the release of Office XP and not removed until the release of Office 2007.