Clippy and FrontPage Retired

In Microsoft Office 2007 there are two things missing. The Office Assistant Clippit who's nickname is Clippy and FrontPage Microsoft's long time web designer. Many people will probably be disappointed about the removal of both of these well at least FrontPage. After many complaints to Microsoft they decided to ditch the paperclip. Microsoft had a huge farewell party for Clippy in 2001 for the launch of Office XP except the little guy refused to leave and just hid from the user on default. But for 2007 Microsoft has officially kicked the poor guy to the corner. Just in case you need any extra employees Clippy is still in search for a job. To find out about FrontPage being retired click continue below.

Microsoft has also decided to say farewell to another major mark in the Office Suite, FrontPage. FrontPage has been around since 1997 which happens to be the same year that Clippy starting working at Microsoft. A lot of people complained that FrontPage put in a lot of unneeded code that made it difficult to edit just the HTML without using the user interface. When I first heard that Microsoft was discontinuing FrontPage I was disappointed. Yes, I use Dreamweaver but I was born and raised on FrontPage, well actually I started out using Publisher. But nonetheless I still like using FrontPage for certain things. However, with all the complaints Microsoft received and the fact that CSS has become very popular they needed to fix these issues and incorporate CSS better. Microsoft did this by replacing FrontPage with Microsoft Expression Web Designer.


Microsoft starting developing software for a new Microsoft suite in 2004. This suite is titled Microsoft Expression Studio and is Microsoft's answer to Adobe's Creative Suite and the newly acquired Macromedia Studio. This suite contains four programs for web design and image editing. Due to the release of Expression Microsoft decided to transfer FrontPage to this suite as Expression Web Designer. FrontPage 2003 and Expression Web Designer look very close but act very different. Expression Web Designer uses XHTML as its default language as opposed to FrontPage's which was HTML. Also Expression Web Designer acts very much like Dreamweaver when it comes to CSS. I must say that even though FrontPage and Expression Web Designer look similar Expression Web Designer is easier to use and it does not put any extra code into your HTML.


You can download a trial version of all four of the Expression Suite programs by clicking here.

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