Microsoft brings back Clippy to Office as part of April Fool prank

While Google tried to trick Gmail users with the ‘Gmail Selfie’, Microsoft too decided to play a prank on it’s Office users. Office users were in for a surprise (of the unpleasant kind) as Office helper/annoyance Clippy returned.

According to a Mashable report, Clippy was back on Office.com. The report notes that, “When users log into their free Office.com accounts and open up a new document in Word, Excel or PowerPoint, Clippy’s big eyes will be there staring back at them. ” The clip would say frankly creepy things like, “Remember when we used to work together?” and quite inappropriately say “It looks like you are writing a letter” when Powerpoint was open.

Microsoft also wrote introduced another version of Clippy as part of the prank, once that contained an actual paper clip.

They put out a detailed blog titled, ‘Introducing Microsoft’s latest innovation: SmartClippy’ announcing the new Clippy which was a paper clip with two little black eyes. Microsoft then went on to explain  the kind of things you could do with Clippy. It wasn’t as funny or as authentic as Google’s Selfie but the version of Clippy back on the real Office.com was quite a shocker.

The post said, Clippy has been there for Microsoft Office users since Office 97 – but with support for Office 2003 and Windows XP ending on 8 April, it’s time for everyone’s favourite office assistant to take on a new role.

Oh and Microsoft decided to throw in a ‘quote’ from Clippy as well which read,“Microsoft announced the date for the end of Windows XP support back in 2007, so I’ve had a lot of time to plan my next move…And now I’m excited to finally announce the next chapter in my life. I’m going back to basics and doing what paper clips like me are born to do: Attach things to other things.”