Office Assistant
The Office Assistant is a version of Microsoft Agent included in Microsoft Office starting with Office 97, and has been dubbed Clippy or Clippit after its animated paperclip representation. Clippy is a conceptual descendant of Microsoft Bob.Animated representations other than the paperclip were available, such as The Dot, F-1, The Genius, Office Logo, Mother Nature, Links and Rocky. But the default paperclip is the most widely known.
Clippy was enabled by default in some versions of Microsoft Office, and came to be widely disliked by many users. It would pop open whenever the program thought the user could use its advice, and frequently either the advice was not really required or it was not really useful. One of the key elements of Microsoft's advertising campaign for Office XP was the removal of Clippy and the Office Assistant from the software, although it was still present if the user enabled it.
The paperclip has inspired takeoffs such as Vigor, a version of the vi text editor with a paperclip providing unhelpful help.