Some of Microsoft's early products included hidden Easter Eggs. Microsoft formally stopped including Easter Eggs in its programs as part of its Trustworthy Computing Initiative in 2002.

Windows

Windows 1.0, 2.0 and 2.1 all include an Easter egg, which features a window that shows a list of people who worked on the software along with a "Congrats!" button. Double clicking the list box further changes the background of the window to tiled smiley faces. The instructions for invoking the Easter egg vary depending on the version: Windows 3.0 has a developer credits page which may be accessed by setting the focus to the desktop (by minimizing all windows and clicking on an open area of the desktop) then typing followed by F3 and in quick succession. This causes the developer credits to appear on the desktop in the form of the email names of the crew. Windows 3.1 has two visible Easter eggs, both of which reference the Microsoft Bear, which was the mascot of the Windows 3.1 development team. One was the developer credits, where the Bear, along with Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Brad Silverberg, present the email aliases of the Windows 3.1 developers. bradsi, being in charge of Windows production, is listed first; the three other presenters, billg, steveb, and t-bear, appear together in "Special Thanks", the last section of the list. The other one was a reference to a fictitious file named BEAR.EXE in the properties window for the MS-DOS Prompt. Internally, there was another egg, where several internal system functions (although having meaningful internal names) were exported from as (where NNN is the ordinal number of the function) in his honor and to discourage their use by third-party software developers. The user can also find the easter egg by opening the About Program Manager, holding down Ctrl, Alt and Shift, double click one colored square of the Microsoft Windows logo, and then close the window. Open it again and do so with a different square (with the keys still pressed down). Keep repeating this until the Microsoft Bear appears in the window, as seen to the right. Windows 95 has an animated presentation of its developers, complete with music. This page is accessed by renaming a folder on the desktop to "and now, the moment you've all been waiting for", then "we proudly present for your viewing pleasure", and finally "The Microsoft Windows 95 Product Team!". Additionally, a dialog with credits can be invoked from the Windows Help application. During the development of Windows 95, the shell developers had several stuffed animals as mascots. In addition to the Microsoft Bear, there were two bunnies as well - the smaller 16-bit Bunny and the larger 32-bit Bunny. The bunnies' names referred to the fact that Windows 95 was the transitional OS. The Microsoft Bunny has an exported function named after him, in. Also, the Bunny is the icon for the Microsoft Party Line in some pre-release versions of Windows 95. In the internet mail app, there is a hidden credits list that can be accessed by clicking Help, About, comctl32.dll, and typing MORTIMER. Windows 98 has a credits screen Easter egg, which can be triggered by invoking with the argument "You_are_a_real_rascal" in the command line or a shortcut (.lnk file), or by clicking and dragging between the locations of Memphis, Egypt; Memphis, Tennessee; and Redmond, Washington on the Time Zone map. (This easter egg is a reference to "Memphis" being the development codename of Windows 98.) A drawing of the Microsoft Bear was used as the icon for the and system files. The odd icon gave credibility to the jdbgmgr.exe virus hoax, which claimed that the files were part of a computer virus. See SULFNBK.EXE for a similar hoax. The Pipes screensaver in Windows 95 (OSR2 onwards), 98, ME, NT 4.0 and 2000 will occasionally insert a Utah teapot as a joint between pipes when the screensaver is configured to draw multiple, traditional-style pipes with mixed joint types and a solid texture. Windows 2000 and Windows XP have an undocumented texture in the Pipes screensaver that makes the pipes red and white, similar to candy canes. An Easter egg that displays the names of all the volcanoes in the United States can be found in the 3D Text screensaver on all versions of Microsoft Windows prior to Windows XP by setting the text to display to "Volcano". In Windows NT 3.5, setting the text to "I love NT" shows the names of the developers. "Rock" and "Beer" lists bands and breweries, respectively. In Windows NT 4.0, the phrase to view the developer credits was changed to "not evil". Setting the text to "I love NT" will instead simply display "good?". Three images are embedded in the surface of Windows Vista's installation DVD. On one of the images shows the faces of the members of Microsoft's anti-piracy team who worked on the hologram. In Windows 10 build 16232, the "Windows is checking for a solution to solve the problem..." dialog that appears when a program crashes is replaced with "Windows is opening a portal to another dimension..."

Microsoft Office

MS Access 1.0

Access 1.0 had a simple animation showing a gun firing and killing two ducks. The story behind this is; one of the team members spoke with a strong accent and when referring to the main competition 'Paradox' it sounded like "Pair o' Ducks". The gun killing the ducks is something like what the earlier release date and ridiculously cheap pricing, did to Paradox. In truth the product was not truly ready for market at the time of the release of 1.0 and it was almost immediately followed up with a free copy of 1.1 for those that could produce evidence of their purchase of 1.0, but the damage had been done to Paradox. Paradox did eventually come to market, and probably with a better product, but by that time, people looking for an all encompassing, low level application and database development platform, were already using Microsoft Access.

Word for Windows 2

In Word for Windows 2, there is a simple animation involving a WordPerfect 'Monster', a fireworks display and credits roll in the About box. The user's name (entered in Tools Options) was appended to the end of the "Thanks" section of the credits.

Office 4.3

The tip of the day would sometimes display the following platitudes. They could also be viewed in the help file. This first appeared in Office 4.3, and also appeared in Office 95, and 97.

Office 95

Office 97

Office 2000

Using Microsoft Excel 2000 and the Office Web Components, a small 3-D game called "Dev Hunter" (inspired by Spy Hunter) is accessible. DirectX must be installed for this to work, and the egg is incompatible with certain service pack upgrades. On the roadway shown in this game, a list of comments appear, all capitalized:

Office 2004 Mac

The game Asteroids is included in the Microsoft Office Notifications application.

Cortana

These features below were discontinued because Cortana is no longer available.

Gaming

Others

Features often mistaken for Easter eggs

The following are not Easter Eggs, but rather features unexpected by many users of Microsoft products.

Microsoft Word

Every version of Microsoft Word from 97 to 2016 (Windows) or 2004 to 2011 (Mac) contain functions to create filler text. On older versions, typing in a Word document and hitting "Enter" results in 3 paragraphs of 5 repetitions of the pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". Typing (with numbers for X and Y) results in X paragraphs of Y repetitions of the sentence. For example, will produce ten paragraphs, each with ten repetitions. Microsoft has officially described this as a feature and not an Easter Egg. In Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010, the repeated sentence is replaced with a longer text: In Microsoft Word 2013, the text was replaced again with When is written, only a simple sentence is shown: in English, it is "On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document." In Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019 and online, the pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" text is available by typing the command and pressing enter. Additionally, typing gives the following text: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna. Nunc viverra imperdiet enim. Fusce est. Vivamus a tellus. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Proin pharetra nonummy pede. Mauris et orci." Typing will produce "N" (where N is an integer) lines of lorem ipsum text. When "N" is larger than 27, the function begins to repeat itself. All of these features will be disabled when "Replace text as you type" is turned off. In Microsoft Word 2021, when dark mode is enabled, the picture icon in the insert tab replaces the sun with a moon.

Microsoft Windows