Microsoft Office 97 was a major
milestone release of
Microsoft Office, which included hundreds of new features and improvements, introduced "Command Bars", a paradigm in which menus and toolbars were made more similar in capability and visual design featured natural language systems and sophisticated grammar checking. It was published on
CD-ROM as well as on a set of 44 3½-inch floppy disks, and became
Y2K safe with Service Release 2. Released on November 19, 1996, it was the last version to support
Windows NT 3.51 on i386 and Alpha (only Word and Excel were available for the Alpha). Two service releases (SR-1 and SR-2) were released for Office 97.