FOR THOSE WHO are still putting together Powerpoint presentations and relying on the 90s style images provided, we have some bad news.
Microsoft has decided to get rid of Clip Art, its image library that was part of Microsoft Office.
“The Office.com Clip Art and image library has closed shop,” Microsoft announced in a blog post. “Usage of Office’s image library has been declining year-to-year as customers rely more on search engines.” (Microsoft took down the post for a short while before posting it again without this second line)
Clip Art was one of those features you used in Word or Powerpoint anytime you wanted to, although it was very much a product of its time.
While these images were around as far back as 1985, Microsoft introduced it as part of its Office suite in 1996. It first started off with 82 clip art files before increasing this to 140,000 in the latest versions.
Alongside the usual images, it also included WordArt which allowed you to type in any text and have it recreated in a different font or colours.
However, the growing popularity of search engines and image searching meant its days were numbered.
As a replacement, Microsoft is pointing people towards Bing Image Search as a way of finding images. According to a blog post made by the company, its image search uses a copyright filter based on the Creative Commons licensing system.
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