What happened to all the clip art?

Amy:

THANK YOU so much for providing this information and link.  I was becoming increasingly frustrated and had nearly given up, like many others here were feeling.  I really appreciate you taking the time to work this out and then share it here for the rest of us.

Have a great day!!  Here's a gold star for your assistance...LOL.

Use this link:

http://amsigns.net/clipart.html

It is Microsoft plus even more you might find useful!

Searching with Bing may be "more satisfactory" -- if the proprietary property rights of photographers, artists, and illustrators are not a great concern.

I echo what others have said.  Hundreds of professional clip art images that I relied heavily on are now no longer available.  I find it quite frustrating that MS's answer is "just go do a search for Clip Art on Bing".  I'm not so much bothered by MS driving customers to an ad-supported MS site.  If that's what they need to do to stay profitable in the competitive productivity software space, so be it.  What I find troubling is the impression it leaves that somehow the clip art that MS provides is equivalent to going and doing a search on the web.

As an Ethics instructor at a local college, I have always taken great care to make sure I use images in my class presentations that are not restricted copyrighted material.  I even went to the trouble of checking in the MS license to make sure that clip art could be used in an educational setting.

I always felt the MS clip art galleries was one of the ways MS added value to its tools.  It set them apart from much cheaper (read free!) productivity tools out there.  The clip art galleries were a great way to maximize the effectiveness of PowerPoint.  In fact, I first discovered them many years ago through Cliff Atkinson's "Beyond Bullet Points" -- a great Microsoft Press book on how to maximize your use of PowerPoint!

Sadly, I do not have time to search on Bing and confirm the licensing agreement of every single image I may or may not want to use.  I'm now stuck either providing a far less media-rich educational experience for my students or paying out of pocket for an image service.

I'm not sure why I'm paying for the MS Office suite any more.

You can always copy and paste the clipart you liked and used in the past from your old word documents. I notice that some of my favorites are missing, but have found them still intact in old word newsletters and other documents, which I copy and paste from. You may want to copy and paste them into a separate word document in a convenient location for use whenever needed.