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Microsoft Office Is Getting Rid of Clip Art in Favor of Bing Image Search Results
As noted in the blog post “Clip Art now powered by Bing Images,” by the Office365 Team on the Office Blogs site, Microsoft Office is getting rid of Clip Art from its Office products. Clip Art, first introduced in 1986 and then integrated into the Microsoft Office suite in Office 97, is the vector-based, “cartoon” art available for use in most of the Office applications, such as Word and PowerPoint. According to the blog post, users have steadily stopped using the Office.com Clip Art Library in favor of using images from search engine results.
While users still have access to clip art, for the moment, it can be assumed from this announcement that the feature will be deprecated by a possible future update to the existing Office products. The post states “Customers also still have the ability to add images to their documents using Bing Image Search.” The images returned by using the Bing Image Search are tagged with the Creative Commons license, allowing for their use within Office documents. A link to the license will be available, so that users can verify if the images they wish to use can be utilized within their documents. However, users must verify this information if switching the settings of the Bing Search Engine to widen the search results to display all images, instead of the default type of images.
Note that you can still use the Bing Image Search to search for “clip art” as the search term, if you are still interested in using vector-based illustrations within your documents and presentations. In addition, images that have been downloaded and inserted into existing documents will remain. The blog post states that existing images saved to devices, OneDrive, and SharePoint will still be available after the Office.com Clip Art Library is discontinued. However, if you have favorite pieces of Clip Art, you should save them before they disappear, as Microsoft Office is getting rid of Clip Art!
