Say goodbye to the endlessly endearing (and sometimes cheesy) graphics to use in your presentations and reports. Microsoft is cutting Clip Art from its Office products.
Due to the outdated look to many of the clip art images, which were very popular in the early days, customers are no longer using them to enhance their modern-day presentations.
According to NPR, “Microsoft will now send Office customers to its Bing search engine for images that are cleared through the Creative Commons licensing system. A Microsoft spokesperson said this move won’t be a big change for most users, as Microsoft, for years, has been using an online Clip Art database:
‘The change will only impact scenarios where a user searches to insert new art into their work. The experience will be the same as it is today, except that the images being searched and pulled for the user will not come from Office.com Clip Art, but rather from Bing Images filtered for Creative Commons licensing.’” (see Microsoft Says Goodbye to Clip Art)
Listen to NPR’s interview with Microsoft’s most prolific clip art artist, Cathy Belleville: NPR Interview with Cathy Belleville