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Microsoft's Age-Old Image Library 'Clip Art' Is No More
hypnosec writes Microsoft has finally bid a goodbye to the age-old Clip Art image library found in its Office products as its usage has been declining over the years. Redmond replaced the Clip Art's online image library with Bing Image Search. This means that people searching for online images inside an Office app will now be directed to a gallery powered by Bing Images that will bring in results from around the web. Bing's copyright filter based on the Creative Commons licensing system will let users get royalty-free images which they can use, share, or modify for either personal or commercial use.
Another feature that was previously offline that has now been replaced with an online only feature that will track you.
I have nothing inherently against online features but the fact that they /always/ go hand in hand with tracking causes me to be against.
If I remember correctly, the OOXML ISO standard that was rushed through some years back included specifications for a clipart library not entirely unlike the Microsoft Office one. I suppose this move means that Microsoft has give up on adhering to its wholly-owned ISO standard.
-- That grumpy BSD guy - http://bsdly.blogspot.com/
Microsoft ClipArt365, a subscription-based online product where you can the entirety of MS's ClipArt library anywhere in the world*. Never worry about not having the right piece of ClipArt at your fingertips; just use our quick ClipSearch** feature and you'll have the right art at your fingerprints in moments! Then simply insert the art into your Word(tm) document, Excel(tm) spreadsheet or Powerpoint(tm) presentation with a single-click!***. All this for $12/mo or $120/year!
* Internet connection required.
** Internet Explorer 12.1 or higher required
*** Requires Office365 or higher. Art cannot be inserted into other documents. Internet connection required to view document with clipart.
For reasons that escape me, my kids' teachers use clip art on everything. You get a flyer with 5 words on it and twice as many clip-art renderings of school buses and apples.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It's because kids don't need good graphic design.
"Clip art being replaced with Bing Images"
At first I like: YAY!
And then I was like: DOH!
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
For all the reasons outline here, unless MS is going to embed their own metadata into every image I use that promises the image is safe, and that if it isn't, MS will foot the bill. Even so, that won't help me if I print something and lose the original digital version with the metadata. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
And it's in Comic Sans, amirite?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
MS Clipart wasn't internal, or stored on your local PC since Microsoft Office 2003. It's gone online to download the clipart. In 2003 -> 2010 it cached them locally so that if you downloaded it once, it was cached on your computer so you could re-use it without having to download it again.
What was nice about the Clipart was they were all vector-based images. Meaning they scaled nicely. All the images that come up using the Bing search are 300x400 or close -- which looks like crap if you try to use it. Sure, most of the images in the clipart library were pretty bad and way overused, but at least they were pixelated crap.
You can still get the classic Office experience back.
Click the up arrow in the right hand side of Ribbon, and it is hidden. Now go to the Quick Access toolbar at the left hand side of the titlebar and from its dropdown menu, choose "Show Below the Ribbon". Now you can add any commands that you want into this toolbar and it essentially gives you the same functionality that you had in previous versions of Word.
Have a nice day.
I'll open the ".DOC" file that they send via email and see :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Or the email with the link to the page containing a list of URLs pointing at PDF files. Because it's easier to do all that than to read whatever is in the PDF file on a web page somewhere.
We should make an email viewer that de-moronifies school emails. In all fairness to the teachers, the content delivery systems that they are stuck with are also very painful.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If Google doesn't also have this creative commons filter, Bing has become the superior product for clip art searches.
It does.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
No, I'm complaining about the ribbon, too, even though I've gotten used to it.
exactly. I don't know why the responses here are so positive. Getting rid of a primarily vector based library that takes up little space and is available locally is not a great move at all. If you don't like it, fine don't use it. But your points are well taken - this move to online everything is tedious, slow, and frustrating. I need my documents in a cloud, but I sure don't need my bloody word processor in the cloud.
Think Global, install Local.
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It could be worse...the first grade newsletters that get sent home from my daughter's school are .pptx (seriously). I think I've only seen Comic Sans once or twice so far, though.
> you're better off googling for it (not binging).
Why, other than anti-Microsoft bias? If Google doesn't also have this creative commons filter, Bing has become the superior product for clip art searches.
Why? Because I've found Google to provide better search results than Bing. That's why. Do you believe that the only reason people use Google instead of Bing is that they have an anti-Microsoft bias?