Clip art, those delightful images reminiscent of the 90s, are set to become a thing of the past as Microsoft announced today they’re doing away with them in favor of Bing Images.
If you’re thinking to yourself, “wait, Clip Art was still a thing?”, yes it was though it had been largely phased out with the release of Office 2013. However, anyone still wanting to use those image was able to do so through using an Office.com Clip Art option.
That Clip Art option is now being replaced by Bing Images, as Microsoft’s Doug Thomas explains that “usage of Office’s image library has been declining year-to-year as customers rely more on search engines.”
In order to ensure its users stay in full copyright compliance while using Bing Images, Microsoft will be employing a copyright filter based on the Creative Commons licensing system. That means it will help you find images that can be shared, modified, or used for commercial purposes.
Users will also have the option to show all web results if they don’t want to be limited to using copyright-free images, just be very careful with what you do with those if you end up using them in your documents.
The 2013 versions of Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint, as well as Office 2010 and Office 2007 are now integrated with Bing Images.
To use this feature on the 2013 versions of Microsoft’s software, click Insert>Online Pictures to be taken to a section where you can browse Bing images. On the 2007 and 2010 versions go to Insert>Clip Art and run a search for images.
It will be interesting to see if this has any impact on Bing’s monthly search volume, as this feature could certainly lead to more searches being performed on Microsoft’s search engine. We’ll have to wait and find out when the next set of monthly numbers are reported.
