You’d better enjoy Microsoft’s cheesy Office Clip Art catalog while you can, because it may be going away in favor of Bing. According to a Microsoft support page, the company is retiring its Office Clip website. As an alternative, Microsoft suggests searching on Bing Images for visuals that are free to use under a Creative Commons license. Just look for the “license” button under the search bar, and choose from the “free to share” or “public domain” options.
Microsoft will no longer offer Clip Art. As an alternative, the company is pointing users to use Bing image search instead. Which is fine, because that’s what everyone was doing anyway. Except maybe for the Bing part. For years, Microsoft’s Clip Art library was a way to get images when finding some quick art to illustrate a Word document or Powerpoint presentation was difficult. The internet has all but eliminated the need for software to ship with bundled stock art, and indeed, Microsoft had already migrated its collection of Clip Art to an online portal. But alas, most people weren’t even bothering with the portal any more, according to Microsoft. In all likelihood, most were turning to Google’s image search, so it makes sense that Microsoft might try, however hopelessly, to get people to use its own portal instead. (Microsoft for some reason took down its announcement, but you can find the cached version here.)
