Microsoft Office may have survived as your trusted work tool over the years, though some of its features have not. One such feature is Clip Art, which Microsoft has announced that it is ending.
Clip Art is Microsoft’s own collection of pictures and templates, which were commonly used during the 90’s to help users ‘jazz up’ Word and PowerPoint documents.
Clip Art images have become so common since then, that it has become second nature to identify clip art images.
But now in the age of easy to find free images, a limited clip art collection is not as useful as it used to be. You can get photos and animated cartoons that are more effective, simply by running a quick search for images online. And lets face it. Some of those Clip Art images are so… well nineties.
Microsoft is replacing the Clip Art library by Bing images, which lets you filter images to ensure they are compliant with the Creative Commons licensing system for personal or commercial use. This means that you’ll soon be replacing old-school clip-art by modern images the next time you use PowerPoint or Word.
Microsoft announced on its website that “The Office.com Clip Art and image library has closed shop.” The website that contained all Clip Art images is no longer available. Microsoft Office’s Doug Thomas said that “Usage of Office’s image library has been declining year-to-year as customers rely more on search engines.” Even the link to the Clip Art website on PowerPoint now takes you to a page that says “If you came to Office.com looking for clip art to use in your documents, please search at Bing Images instead. The Office Clip Art site has been retired.” It then explains how to find images on Bing that are legally authorized to use.
