Microsoft Abandons Clip Art due to Lack of Interest

Clip art, the endless source of sometimes poorly drawn, but really expressive graphics used in a series of company memos and other documents, will be discontinued by Microsoft as nobody seems to use it anymore, Gizmodo reports. Users are encouraged to turn to Microsoft’s own search engine, more precisely its image search feature.

Microsoft’s Clip Art Gallery was a quick and easy way to find images – illustrations for Word documents or PowerPoint presentations – for years. The need for this method has been in time eliminated by the internet, allowing content creators to find the perfect image for their articles, blog posts, documents, presentations or any other content they create with just a quick search and a few clicks. Being rendered obsolete by the power of search engines, Clip Art is being discontinued by Microsoft Corporation.

In an announcement published on Microsoft’s Office blog the Redmond giant has announced it’s closing the Clip Art and image library at Office.com. Instead the company recommends its users to insert images saved to their own devices – smartphones, tablets and PCs – or their cloud services as a source, and to locate free to use content using Bing’s Image Search. As the post – that was in the meantime taken down from Office.com, but is still available through Google’s cache – suggests, users can run a quick image search through Bing (or any other search engine, actually) and use the search engine’s license filters to find free to use images. Microsoft leaves it to the user to make sure the image is free to reproduce.

Microsoft provides its users with a detailed guide on how to add images to their documents using Bing.com’s image search feature here. Those not in a friendly relationship with Bing can choose to do the same with Google (by selecting Search Tools -> Usage Rights to make sure the pictures are free to reuse or republish).