Office’s clip art finally succumbs to modern image search

By Digital Trends Staff December 2, 2014

Say goodbyte to the best friend of PowerPoint presentations throughout the 90’s, adder of pizzazz to financial reports, and the best way anyone and their grandma could make a birthday card feel a little more personal. Today Microsoft announced it’s shutting down the Clip Art website in a bid to get more people to switch over to their in-house search service Bing.

According to a blog post by the company the image library has seen a steady decline over the past ten years as more people grow past the need to plaster outdated vector drawings around the edges of their book reports and instead opt to use services like Google Images to give their project that extra pop. The aging archive of Clip Art just isn’t as attractive as it used to be.

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The Office.com Clip Art and image library has closed shop. Customers can still add images to their documents, presentations, and other files that they have saved to their devices (phones, tablets, and PCs), OneDrive, and SharePoint. Customers also still have the ability to add images to their documents using Bing Image Search [which has] higher quality images that are more up-to-date,” the Office team wrote.

And while the move makes sense, all things considered, the demise of Clip Art does feel like the end of an era.

Microsoft says that once the library closes up shop for good all Clip Art images will still be searchable through Bing under a creative commons license. That’s good news if you’re feeling especially nostalgic and Clippy just isn’t getting the job done like he used to.

A guide to how to find these images can be found in their own tutorial, linked on the Office Support site here.

Contributor Chris Stobing provided the text for this video news post.

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