List of Easter eggs in Microsoft products


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

has a developer credits page which may be accessed by setting the focus to the desktop then typing win30 followed by 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 were exported from user.exe as BEARNNN in his honor and to discourage their use by incautious third party software developers. The user can also find the easter egg by opening the About Program Manager, holding down, and, 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. 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, 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, BUNNY_351 in krnl386.exe. Also, the Bunny is the icon for the Microsoft Party Line in some pre-release versions of Windows 95.
Windows 98 has a credits screen Easter egg, which can be triggered by invoking weldata.exe with the argument "You_are_a_real_rascal" in the command line or in a shortcut, or alternatively through clicking and dragging between the locations of Memphis, Egypt; Memphis, Tennessee; and Redmond, Washington on the Time Zone map.
A drawing of the Microsoft Bear was used as the icon for the SETDEBUG.EXE and JDBGMGR.EXE 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, 98, ME, NT 4.0 and 2000 occasionally insert a Utah teapot instead of a standard joint. It only appears if the pipes are "multiple", pipe-style "standard", joint-type "multiple" and texture "solid" under the screensaver's settings. 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 is found in the 3D Text screensaver, when setting the text to "Volcano", on all versions of Microsoft Windows that include it, but prior to Windows XP. In NT 3.5 setting the Text to "I love NT" shows the names of the developers. "Rock" and "Beer" lists bands and breweries. In NT 4.0 setting the Text to "I love NT" will display only the word "good?", the lists of developers will shown, when entering the text "not evil".
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.

Microsoft Office

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 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 fun and inspirational tips. They could also be viewed in the help file. This first appeared in Office 4.3, and also appeared in Office 95, and 97.
Using Microsoft Excel 2000 and the Office Web Components, a small 3-D game called "Dev 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:
The game Asteroids is included in the Microsoft Office Notifications application.

Gaming

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 or 2004 to 2011 contains a function to create filler text: typing =rand 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 =rand results in X paragraphs of Y repetitions of the sentence. For example, =rand 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 =rand 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, and 2013, the pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" text is available by typing the command =rand.old and pressing enter.
Additionally, typing =lorem 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 =lorem will produce "N" 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.

Microsoft Excel

Since version 5, Excel has possessed a "datedif" function, which calculates the difference in whole days, months or years between two dates. Although this function is still present in Excel 2007 and 2010, it was only documented in Excel 2000.

Microsoft Windows