A newly resurfaced Office 97 Easter egg reveals Clippy’s secret role, proving the paperclip was trolling us long before memes

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Remember Clippy, the helpful (and sometimes annoying) paperclip assistant from Microsoft Office? Well, he’s back – discovered as a hidden surprise within the original Office 97! This secret, unnoticed for decades, shows that Microsoft developers were adding jokes to their software even back in the 1990s. It turns out Clippy was playfully ‘trolling’ users long before he became a popular internet meme. Recently, a user on X (formerly Twitter) named Albacore shared this surprising discovery, bringing a piece of software history to light.

If you follow a particular set of steps in Office 97, you can uncover a hidden surprise. By performing a specific combination of actions and keystrokes within Microsoft Word, you’ll be able to view a list of the people who developed the program.

To see the hidden surprise, change your computer’s date to 1997 or a later year. After that, press and hold the Control key while clicking and dragging the main toolbar.

Next, move the toolbar in a circular pattern – left, down, right, then up. Be sure to press and release the Control key after each movement.

Once you’ve completed those steps, search for the exact phrase “This is not a contest” within Clippy. Make sure to include the period at the end of the sentence in your search.

Albacore demonstrated how to get the Easter egg to appear and shared some other details on X.

It’s no surprise this hidden feature remains undiscovered after 29 years, considering how complicated it is to activate,” the tech expert explained. “The helpful tips from Clippit are just a bonus.”

You can also make more animations appear by holding Shift while you press Search.

This Easter egg is incredibly hard to discover, making me question if it was actually meant to be found at all. The steps to unlock it – a precise sequence of dragging a toolbar and then searching for something specific with Clippy – are so unusual that it seems almost impossible to stumble upon them while simply using Office 97.

It seems this was just a fun way for the game’s creators to include a hidden set of acknowledgements for themselves.

However, other hidden features in older programs were just as complicated to find, like the pinball game in Word 97 and the flight simulator in Excel 97.

Whether you loved or hated Clippy, his recent reappearance is a fun look back at the early days of tech and the quirky jokes that defined it. It also shows that Microsoft has always had a bit of a playful side. Either way, it’s surprising to see the little paperclip still making unexpected appearances after all these years.

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2026-01-18 23:17