Depending on your age and when you started your relationship with the computer, Talking about Office 97 may sound like prehistory to you, will remind you of your first moments in front of the PC, or remember it as the logical evolution of a multi-brand design made up of WordPerfect (or even WordStar), Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase. So, after telling you that if you think of it as prehistory, you’re exaggerating a lot because it really hasn’t been that long (nor has it been that fast, nor do I have as many gray hairs as the mirror tells me), I can’t help but remember Clippy, a great forerunner of digital assistants and, although I know this is an unpopular opinion, a great helper when editing all types of documents.

Clippy was with us for ten years.anticipate our needs with needs «It looks like you are writing a letter. Do you need help?» even if at that time there were those who began to call it unbearable (I remember much worse and much more offensive qualifications), a few years ago and in response to tweet It was crystal clear from Microsoft’s official account that a lot of people actually wanted Clippy, they just weren’t aware of it.

The problem, as it usually happens in these cases, is that we tend to cherish what we’ve already lost, and Clippy is no exception, because as I mentioned earlier, debuted in Office 97 and left us 10 years laterthat is, it is only present in versions of Microsoft Office that have long since ended their life cycle and are theoretically completely incompatible with Windows 10 and Windows 11, the two versions of the operating system that are currently most used.

Of course, at this point we have to ask ourselves, is it really impossible to install software as old as Office 95 or Office 97 on a current PC with a current operating system? Well, based on what it doesn’t seem Added by WinExperimentswhich shows us a video of a user who managed to install and run Office 95 on Windows 10, bringing attention back to the always juicy issue of Microsoft’s operating system and application tradition. drag and drop a plethora of legacy elements.

The result of the experiment is actually even more surprisingIf you watch the video, you will see that the user combines the use of Excel 365, the latest version of Microsoft’s spreadsheet, with Word 95, the version of the word processor included in last year’s version of Microsoft Office. The next one will be three decades old.

Installing such an old version of Office is not that simpleHowever, there are a few adjustments that need to be made when you run the installer, and it may not work even under these circumstances. In fact, before writing this report, I have done several tests in this regard and in none of them I was able to complete the process successfully. But Clippy deserves to keep trying to install Office 97 on Windows 11, so I won’t give up.