Microsoft to remove Clip Art on Word, Outlook and PowerPoint

Microsoft has 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, according to The Verge.

Clip Art was introduced in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint back in the '90s but had suffered falling usage over the years, with the increasing amount of images available on the internet. Microsoft has therefore decided to put the feature to rest and redirect users to Bing, where they could search for the images they wanted.

However, not all the images on Bing were free to use, as Microsoft had a filter to only allow use of images that fell under the Creative Commons licence. This might limit the images available, but compared to the illustrated images familiar in the past Clip Art feature, the new images were more modern and useful, according to The Verge.

Explaining the matter on the company's official blog post, Doug Thomas 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 further stated that several Office products such as Office 2007, Office 2010, Word 2013, PowerPoint 2013 and Outlook 2013 now redirected to Bing Images.

The collection started with only 82 illustrations built into Word 6.0 in 1996, eventually growing to over 100,000 static and moving images housed online.

"Usage of Office's image library has been declining year-to-year as customers rely more on search engines," said Microsoft in a blog post.

"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."

Stock and royalty-free images would from now be served to Office applications via Microsoft's Bing Images.

According to commentators the move made sense given that anyone looking to insert images into a presentation or document was now far more likely to search on Google rather than select from the Clip Art collection.