Microsoft decided to remove its Clip Art features on the recent installments of Office products such as Word, Outlook and PowerPoint, and instead started redirecting users to Bing Images, The Verge reported.
Clip Art first appeared in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint back in the '90s but have suffered a decrease in usage over the years due to the increasing amount of images available on the internet. Consequently, Microsoft decided to put the feature to rest and instead redirected their users to Bing, where they could search for the images they wanted.
However, not all the images on Bing are free for use, as Microsoft has added in a filter to only allow usage of images that fall under the Creative Commons licensing system. This may limit the images available, but compared to the illustrated images familiar in the past Clip Art feature, the new images are more modern and useful, according to The Verge.
Doug Thomas explained the matter on Microsoft's official blog post. He confirmed the decline in usage of Clip Art in Office products and urged users to try out Bing for "higher quality" and "more up-to-date" images.
He also stated that several Office products such as Office 2007, Office 2010, Word 2013, PowerPoint 2013 and Outlook 2013 now redirect to Bing Images.
Microsoft also made a separate post on their Office Support Blog where users could look up instructions specific to their Office product on how to access Bing Images and insert the picture into their file.
The desktop Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 have almost similar instructions to the Office 2013, by clicking on the "Insert" tab and then the "Illustrations" group. A "Search for" text box is easily available for users to search images and then copy them onto their work area.
For Office Online, on the other hand, users will need to click the "Insert" tab, type the keywords in the search bar under "Clip Art" and click the magnifying glass button to find the images. A click of the "Insert" button and they are ready to use the images on their work area.