Users of Microsoft's Office desktop applications such as Word and PowerPoint will now have a new way to find and use clip art in their documents. The company revealed that their Office Clip Art website has been shut down, but Office users can now access similar images from Microsoft's Bing search engine.
Microsoft said that it has seen the use of their Office Clip Art site decline over the past few years as users have moved onto finding their images on Internet search engines. Now those same desktop programs can access Bing image search results more directly to locate their clip art. Microsoft says:
"Bing Image Search has higher quality images that are more up-to-date. For example, searching for 'cellphone' gives more variety and modern looking phones instead of the old-school bricks from Clip Art. Also, Bing uses a copyright filter based on the Creative Commons licensing system. These are images you can use, share, or modify for either personal or commercial use (settings can be switched to Show all web results to view more images)."
Have you already been using search engines for finding clip art to insert in your Office documents?
Source: Microsoft
