As the years pass, more and more legacy features in Office are being discontinued. Following Clippy’s footsteps, Clip Art sees a similar fate as Microsoft has replaced those old-school goofy images with Bing-powered image results.
Microsoft admitted that usage of Clip Art has been on a decline as users relied on search engines to obtain images. Now, Microsoft has decided to shut down the Office.com Clip Art library and replace Clip Art in Office 2007, 2010 and 2013 with royalty-free images from Bing.com. Although, at of the time of writing, Clip Art images are still available.
By default, the Bing-powered images provided are licensed under the Creative Commons which allows users to use, share, or modify the images for both personal and commercial purposes. However Microsoft is also giving users the ability to view all image search results too.
To access the Bing-powered images in Word, Outlook and PowerPoint 2013, simply navigate to ‘Insert’, then ‘Online Pictures’, or ‘Insert’, then ‘Clip Art’ in Office 2007 and 2010.
Further reading: Bing, Microsoft, Office, Office 2013
