What happens if you want to insert a picture but you don’t have an appropriate one? ClipArt is here to save the day! ClipArt is a collection of pictures and photographs provided by Microsoft for you to use in your documents.

 

To start the ClipArt process, you can either click the Insert Clipart button () on the drawing toolbar, or click the Insert menu, click Picture, and click ClipArt.

 

Once you do this, the ClipArt task pane will open. Here’s a sample:

 

 

First, type in what kind of picture you want to find. Try to stay general and use keywords; for example, type in “Christmas Tree” rather than “green Douglas fir tree used for Christmas.”

 

Next, choose what collection you want to search in. You can choose your personal collection, the Office collection, or Web collections. You can expand each collection to see specific collections. This can be useful if you want to search for a very specific picture; you can uncheck collections that clearly don’t have any relevance, and this will shorten the search time. As another example, if you don’t have an Internet connection, you can uncheck Web Collections. This will also shorten your searching time.

The third option allows you to choose a specific media type to search for: ClipArt, photographs, movies, or sounds. You can then expand each media type to look for files that have a particular extension, such as a WAV audio file. In these exercises, we’re going to focus on searching for graphics (clip art and photographs) as these are the types that are most common.

 

Once you’ve filled out those three options, click Go. Then, your results will be displayed in the large white pane (it’s marked with a 4 in the sample figure).

 

Here’s an example of a completed search:

 

 

 

Once you have the result you want, you can right-click it for more options.

-          Insert: Inserts the picture into your document.

-          Copy: Copies the picture to the clipboard.

-          Delete from Clip Organizer

-          Copy to Collection

-          Move to Collection

-          Edit Keywords: Add or remove keywords from this graphic to make future searches easier.

-          Find Similar Style: Find more pictures like this.

-          Preview/Properties: Opens a properties window to give you a preview of the picture and to provide you with more information.

 

Once you have inserted ClipArt, you can edit it like a normal picture, using the tools we talked about at the very beginning of this section. You can insert as many ClipArt images as you want in a document (until it reaches the maximum size, of course), from as many sources as you want.