The default assistant was 'Clippit', nicknamed 'Clippy', a paperclip. Microsoft Office 97 is the first version of Office to feature the Office Assistant, a feature designed to assist users by the way of an interactive animated character, which interfaced with the Office help content. It also featured natural language systems and sophisticated grammar checking. Office 97 introduced 'Command Bars,' a paradigm in which menus and toolbars were made more similar in capability and visual design. Assisted support options and security updates for Office 97 ended on January 16, 2004. Mainstream hotfix support for Office 97 ended on August 31, 2001, while extended hotfix support ended on February 28, 2002.

Two Service Releases (SR-1 and SR-2) were released for Office 97 SR-2 solved the year 2000 problem in Office 97.

It is the last version of Microsoft Office to support Windows NT 3.51 SP5 and Windows NT 4.0 RTM–SP2 as the following version, Microsoft Office 2000 only supports Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0 SP3 or later. It is not officially supported on Windows XP or later versions of Windows. The suite is officially compatible with Windows NT 3.51 SP5, Windows 95 or later. Microsoft Office 97 became a major milestone release which includes hundreds of new features and improvements over its predecessor. A Mac OS equivalent, Microsoft Office 98 Macintosh Edition, was released on January 6, 1998.

It succeeded Microsoft Office 95 and was replaced by Microsoft Office 2000 in 1999. Microsoft Office 97 (version 8.0) is the fifth major release for Windows of Microsoft Office, released by Microsoft on November 19, 1996.

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