RIP Microsoft Clip Art – now you can fill your slides with web cat pics

Anyone who has sat through as many biz presentations as the average Reg hack will have come to loathe clip art – as so many PHBs think adding a few duff images to a boring PowerPoint shows how hip they are with technology.

Now Microsoft has announced it's binning the clip art collection at the heart of this mediocrity. And the reason is really simple – no one's using it any more.

"The Office.com Clip Art and image library has closed shop," according to Redmond's Office blog. "Usage of Office's image library has been declining year-to-year as customers rely more on search engines."

Search engines are very good for this kind of thing, although far too many people play fast and loose with copyright on those doodles. So Microsoft's answer is to encourage its customers to use Bing to find images and illustrations instead.

To aid this Bing image searches now come with an option to only look for results that are available under a Creative Commons license (just like Google, cough) meaning they can be used for most purposes without getting a letter of complaint from the designer.

Microsoft has also added a drop-down menu option to Office to make this process easier. The function has been included in current builds of Office 365, Word 2013, Outlook 2013, and PowerPoint 2013, as well as Office 2010 and Office 2007.

On the plus side, this should mean better presentations for all. On the other hand, the web being the web, we expect to see plenty of slides showing stuff like this. ®